Why Is It Important To Read Great Books?

Many of my fellow college bound high-schoolers seem lost in this day and age. They pursue a field, usually with the best of intentions. They pick a college with their intended major. Nonetheless, they usually end up switching majors, or even colleges. Why is this? In many ways, it is due to a lack of commitment – not necessarily on the part of the student, but on the part of the education industrry. A lack of commitment to truth, to the great facts about life and the great questions of life. The students who are lost today are largely lost to a lack of pursuing these great questions. They cannot enjoy their knowledge of specifics because they do not have a base of knowledge, a worldview that provides context for their studies and answers to the questions their fields raise. I count myself blessed not to be among those who struggle …show more content…
These are the men who wrote the Great Books, which are the liberal arts curriculum. The men formed by the Great Books have been the great minds of countless ages: Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. My admiration of some of these men's skills, particularly my enjoyment of fine literature, was in many ways my first taste of the liberal arts. Due to a strong Catholic upbringing, I enjoyed my theology classes, and came to more of the arts through history and philosophy, as well as literature, which remained consistently my favorite school subject throughout high school. Although other liberal arts disciplines, such as grammar, have never been a huge interest, I can appreciate the need for them, such as the respect for order and logic that grammar strives to implant. In fact, my brief studies of some aspects of the liberal arts have only served to make me more fascinated by the prospect of studying further what the great minds of the past