One of my teachers forwarded this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal. Here it is:
The article is on the literacy gap between boys and girls. Boys, it is noted, read less than girls. They are too busy playing video games. What is hilarious and sad is the trend that the article notes. We have tried to get boys to read by introducing childish, gross books because, as the advocates say, it is better to have them reading something. Content, it seems, does not matter. Reading is reading, they say. This, of course, is bunk. Plato knew better. In The Republic, he banned children from even hearing some stories.
Thankfully, classical Christian education provides boys with books that will make them men. Books and stories that made our Founding Fathers men. Here are just a few to try out:
- Herodotus The Histories—Boys should pay special attention to the pass at Thermopylae where 300 Greeks stood against a million Persians with the fate of the Western world hanging in the balance.
- Thucydides The Peloponnesian War—Boys should read the funeral oration of Pericles over and over.
- Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene—Especially the story of the Redcrosse Knight and the slaying of the dragon. “So down he fell…”
Read this, the Rings Trilogy and the Bible and you are well on the way to forming a masculine imagination.
