Why Read Great Books? - Education - Homeschooling

Show one of the great books to homeschool skeptics and tell them that your teenage child is going to read it. Watch their eyes roll. If they manage a verbal protest, it will likely take one of two forms or combine both.

1) This book is far too hard. Perhaps, in the case of your child, they will graciously concede that the difficulty level is within your child's reach. But the complexity and density of its ideas makes the book far too hard for the average child, who needs public-school textbooks, composed of bite-sized chunks and colorful diagrams which make learning easy and fun!

2) This book is irrelevant. How can the histories of Herodotus, who was clearly wrong about much of his geography and gave space to many flights of fancy (such as the story of the gold-mining ants), be relevant in the 21st century? Won't such cobwebbed texts simply distract a student from more urgent studies in computers, mathematics and the social sciences? Furthermore, many so-called great books are worse than irrelevant - they are dangerous. The Western Canon is simply a mass of euro-centric viewpoints scribbled by dead white males.

One effective way to face this kind of argument is to accept your opponents' points, with some elaboration.

1) Yes, this book is too hard. Reading it will be much harder than simply reading short, grade-level texts. My child will, at times, be frustrated by the length of certain passages or the difficulty of specific concepts.

But what's wrong with that? What is wrong with struggling to comprehend? Furthermore, why is it necessary to understand absolutely everything about a book that you are reading? (In my own case, I read Tolkien when I was eleven. Did I understand everything? No. Did I profit greatly from attempting to understand it all? Yes!)

2) Yes, some of what is read may be irrelevant, or seem that way. I wouldn't want my child to really think that there were gold-mining ants in India.

But, first, my child won't be reading this in a vacuum - in a homeschool environment, a parent is generally available every minute of the day to answer clarifying questions and augment the information presented.

Second, is it really irrelevant to know what someone from another culture thought about the world? Don't students in modern universities study other cultures who may believe things that many Westerners consider nonsense? That being the case, perhaps my child can profit from exposure to the thoughts of the ancients, even when they were demonstrably wrong.

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