The Tools to Rebuild Our Civil Society Are on Our Book Shelves | Opinion

“The beginning is the most important part of any work,” Plato writes in The Republic, “especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed.”

What Plato knew—and what we’ve forgotten—is that a healthy civil society does not begin in politics. It begins in education. And not education in the narrow, technical sense, but education in first principles: freedom, equality, law, justice, reason, and the responsibilities of the citizen. These reflect values and ideals by which we live, but their meaning is not self-evident —they must be discovered and debated, learned and earned, and intentionally taught.

And the most enduring forms through which to teach them are the “Great Books,” the enduring classics of our intellectual tradition, from the Bible and the Iliad to works by authors ranging from Plato to Augustine, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Nietzsche and beyond. These are the foundational works that have shaped our ideas of truth, justice, beauty, and the self. The Great Books movement viewed direct reading and discussion of such classic texts as foundational to undergraduate education and to an educated citizenry. Core curricula at the University of Chicago and Columbia University have roots in this movement, as does my own institution, St. John’s College. This approach is central to the ever expanding K-to-12 Classical Education movement.

But as with everything today, the Great Books are widely misunderstood, because they are viewed through the lens of political ideology. On the right, they are often treated as cultural property—prized more as artifacts of Western identity than as living texts that challenge us and demand moral seriousness. On the left, they are still too often dismissed as relics of a colonial, misogynistic, or patriarchal past, a curriculum of dead white men irrelevant or antithetical to our struggles for freedom and equality.

But the Great Books are neither conservative nor progressive. They are human and belong to all of us. They explore the soul and the state, and they wrestle with power, truth, tyranny and freedom. They contain both the roots of liberal democracy and the seeds of revolution. They challenge…