Re: "Deciding on behalf of the next generation that they don't get to inherit the only society that's actually available for them to live in."
I think there's a serious risk that immersing your kids in the Great Books will amount to doing exactly that. I think a lot of people find that having been elevated culturally makes them a fish out of water in the society they actually land in. They want to talk about Locke or the Pleistocene or "Sailing to Byzantium," and can't because no one around them will understand.
And I think it tends to be a price worth paying. The point for the present is that BenOp and Great Books are typically on the same side, including with respect to preparation for living in society. They're both refuges from cultural degradation, in different but related and frequently overlapping ways, and may exact a high lifetime cost in maladjustment, or pay off special ways of flourishing, or both.
Loving truth and beauty may be alienating for some in a society that doesn't appreciate them, but forming your kids' sensibilities with those things is not telling them they can't be part of their own society or help shape the future.
If you try to prevent exposure to that society, or intentionally avoid giving them the skills they would need to make it there, that's a more deliberate act on your part. Sure, there are not-dissimilar preferences and even goals in the two groups, but the thing that's different is pretty crucial, and my advice about how to develop a Great Books curriculum tracks my concerns in this regard.
So I'm quite sympathetic to Great Books education as a project, and I'm certainly not inclined to steer young people away from moving, thought-provoking, historic books because I don't think the content is objectively, correct. Know the history of the human race.
That said, it is a little bit difficult to explain why a kid should read The Iliad if they don't want to. You probably won't "need" it. At least now, with AI, you can always firm up your recollection of it with a quick chat conversation, if you want to put it to use in an argument or something. But you probably won't get much opportunity. "You should read the great books" is an argument I would fight for valiantly, but half expecting to lose.
What puzzled me was the reference to "BenOp bunkers" as if they're an alternative to great Books.
Do you really think that families who try to live the Benedict Option are less likely to read great books from the past? I should think, on the contrary, that to create some distance from modern distractions is far more favorable to those pursuits. BenOp and Great Books are naturally on the same side.
And the original Benedictines make the point very strikingly. They are famous for nothing more than for the laborious preservation of old books at a time when no one else cared!
A rigorous BenOp approach is definitely consistent with loving Great Books, and I have no doubt that BenOp people are reading them more than the population at large (which is a low bar but still), but I think rigorous "BenOp-ism" is still a bad idea for other reasons. Which I've mentioned before on this site, though I expect we'll discuss them more.
However, BenOp bunkers can become "an alternative to Great Books" in one very significant sense: if you think the bunker can save your children from ever needing to confront the challenges of the world you might feel reasonably free to read, either "whatever you want" (which might not be too bad if it's fascinating and fun), or (considerably worse), the books that you think will make the young into "the right sort of people." Either without reference to the larger world or possibly in reaction against it.
At that point I think you're falling into the "propaganda instead of propagation" trap. Deciding on behalf of the next generation that they don't get to inherit the only society that's actually available for them to live in. You're not planning to equip them for it. Indeed, you may be intentionally non-equipping them for it, conditioning them intentionally to be fish out of water if they try to make their way in the modern world.
But I realize the difference between "prepping your kids to be dynamically countercultural" and "trying to relegate them to the bunkers" can be fairly subtle on the ground. Nearly everyone thinks that kids need some protective measures, and even the most hardened "bunker dwellers" probably hope to emerge eventually (even if only in several generations). I still think the difference is worth keeping in mind.
Benedictines, of course, chose to leave the world to dedicate themselves to a particular set of pursuits. They also lived in a different sort of world, and that matters too, but it's important that the decision wasn't made for them by elders who didn't think they could hack it.
Re: "Deciding on behalf of the next generation that they don't get to inherit the only society that's actually available for them to live in."
I think there's a serious risk that immersing your kids in the Great Books will amount to doing exactly that. I think a lot of people find that having been elevated culturally makes them a fish out of water in the society they actually land in. They want to talk about Locke or the Pleistocene or "Sailing to Byzantium," and can't because no one around them will understand.
And I think it tends to be a price worth paying. The point for the present is that BenOp and Great Books are typically on the same side, including with respect to preparation for living in society. They're both refuges from cultural degradation, in different but related and frequently overlapping ways, and may exact a high lifetime cost in maladjustment, or pay off special ways of flourishing, or both.
Loving truth and beauty may be alienating for some in a society that doesn't appreciate them, but forming your kids' sensibilities with those things is not telling them they can't be part of their own society or help shape the future.
If you try to prevent exposure to that society, or intentionally avoid giving them the skills they would need to make it there, that's a more deliberate act on your part. Sure, there are not-dissimilar preferences and even goals in the two groups, but the thing that's different is pretty crucial, and my advice about how to develop a Great Books curriculum tracks my concerns in this regard.
So I'm quite sympathetic to Great Books education as a project, and I'm certainly not inclined to steer young people away from moving, thought-provoking, historic books because I don't think the content is objectively, correct. Know the history of the human race.
That said, it is a little bit difficult to explain why a kid should read The Iliad if they don't want to. You probably won't "need" it. At least now, with AI, you can always firm up your recollection of it with a quick chat conversation, if you want to put it to use in an argument or something. But you probably won't get much opportunity. "You should read the great books" is an argument I would fight for valiantly, but half expecting to lose.
What puzzled me was the reference to "BenOp bunkers" as if they're an alternative to great Books.
Do you really think that families who try to live the Benedict Option are less likely to read great books from the past? I should think, on the contrary, that to create some distance from modern distractions is far more favorable to those pursuits. BenOp and Great Books are naturally on the same side.
And the original Benedictines make the point very strikingly. They are famous for nothing more than for the laborious preservation of old books at a time when no one else cared!
A rigorous BenOp approach is definitely consistent with loving Great Books, and I have no doubt that BenOp people are reading them more than the population at large (which is a low bar but still), but I think rigorous "BenOp-ism" is still a bad idea for other reasons. Which I've mentioned before on this site, though I expect we'll discuss them more.
However, BenOp bunkers can become "an alternative to Great Books" in one very significant sense: if you think the bunker can save your children from ever needing to confront the challenges of the world you might feel reasonably free to read, either "whatever you want" (which might not be too bad if it's fascinating and fun), or (considerably worse), the books that you think will make the young into "the right sort of people." Either without reference to the larger world or possibly in reaction against it.
At that point I think you're falling into the "propaganda instead of propagation" trap. Deciding on behalf of the next generation that they don't get to inherit the only society that's actually available for them to live in. You're not planning to equip them for it. Indeed, you may be intentionally non-equipping them for it, conditioning them intentionally to be fish out of water if they try to make their way in the modern world.
But I realize the difference between "prepping your kids to be dynamically countercultural" and "trying to relegate them to the bunkers" can be fairly subtle on the ground. Nearly everyone thinks that kids need some protective measures, and even the most hardened "bunker dwellers" probably hope to emerge eventually (even if only in several generations). I still think the difference is worth keeping in mind.
Benedictines, of course, chose to leave the world to dedicate themselves to a particular set of pursuits. They also lived in a different sort of world, and that matters too, but it's important that the decision wasn't made for them by elders who didn't think they could hack it.