Why Literature Is Crucial for a Good Education

Through literature, children can learn about human nature, and the consequences of different characters’ decisions. (Biba Kayewich)

Imagine flying an airplane without any practice. No test runs. No simulators. No instructor. No preparation. Just you in the cockpit in a misty cloud, unable to see. There’s a good likelihood that you will crash. In order to successfully fly an airplane, you need to be able to practice the maneuvers over and over before you do them in real life, and you need to learn from the wisdom of an experienced pilot before you take to the skies on your own.

The same holds true for living a good life, which is the ultimate goal of education. We need practice and experience if we wish to be successful—in the truest sense—in life. Few of us can perform any action expertly with no practice, and that also holds true for living well.

Through literature, children can learn about human nature, and the consequences of different characters’ decisions. (Biba Kayewich)

Experiencing Life Through Literature

But where can we find “practice” for life? How can children and young adults gain life experience when they are still, by definition, inexperienced? The answer is good literature. Through it, you can experience, in a way, multiple lifetimes—centuries worth of the experience of our civilization’s greatest minds, transmitted to us through the classic literary works of our culture. If education is about forming happy and virtuous human beings who have the wisdom and strength to live well, then literature has a key role to play in it.

All art is an imitation of something, as Plato and Aristotle tell us. A painter imitates a landscape. A sculptor imitates the human form. A fiction writer imitates life itself, and the best novels have about them something of the quality and texture of life in all its complexity, grit, and glory. The greatest writers—literary giants such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Dostoevsky—are individuals with profound wisdom and experience and penetrating insight into human nature, with its glimmering peaks and shadowy depths, who communicate this wisdom through entertaining and moving imitations of life.

When you read a true classic, you enter into the thoughts and feelings of a character. You get outside of yourself. And, maybe most importantly, you see the consequences of that character’s decisions, both the good and the ill, play out dramatically before your eyes. For children and teens, then, this can be a kind of test run for the decisions they will have to make in their own lives. Guided by the wise literary pilots of past ages, young readers learn from the mistakes and triumphs of characters so that they don’t have to learn the same lessons the hard way—by brutal, unforgiving personal experience. Literature provides life experiences without the painful price tag.

Training the Emotions

Although much of education (rightly) focuses on training the mind, literature adds to this the often neglected aspect of training the emotions—that is, forming within students the habits of fitting emotional responses to what they encounter in the world, responses that align with the right reason. As C.S. Lewis says in “The Abolition of Man,”

“Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.”

Lewis goes on to lament the rise of what he calls “men without chests,” people whose hearts haven’t been properly developed alongside their heads to react to the world in a healthy way.

We need “men with chests” now more than ever—not sentimental people, those who seek emotion for emotion’s sake, but people whose hearts have been ennobled and elevated by contact with visions of profound beauty and truth, enshrined within great works of art. We need people who react viscerally to evil by rejecting it and to good by yearning for it.

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In his description of an ideal education, contained in his “Politics,” Aristotle says, “Virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, [and] there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgements, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble action.”

Aristotle explains that the cultivation of taking “delight in good dispositions and noble action” can be accomplished through music. He points out that certain kinds of music can exercise our emotions, making us feel courageous, hopeful, etc., and “the habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.”

Modern science confirms Aristotle’s claim that art—like music or literature—can form the emotions to be healthy. It’s been scientifically demonstrated that reading literary fiction actually improves one’s empathy. After all, literature is always helping us to imagine what it is like to be in someone else’s position.

The Holistic Passion of Literature

Literature appeals to the whole person—the mind, the emotions, the imagination, the memory, and the senses. As poet William Wordsworth says of the power of poetry, “its object is truth ... carried alive into the heart by passion.”

Since it engages so many human faculties at once, it has the power to teach truth in a way that nothing else can. It’s one thing to know what fidelity is in theory. It’s another to see it, to live it out, in some sense, alongside Penelope in the “Odyssey.” It’s one thing to know intellectually that murder is wrong and nihilism leads to despair. It’s another to experience, as it were, the profound and miserable psychological, moral, familial, and legal ramifications of these things alongside Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.”

Literature is truth embodied, truth brought alive, and truth burned into the heart. And isn’t that what we hope for in the education of our children—that truth will be not only a fact they memorize but also a reality they experience, a contact with something vitally alive and meaningful? Can there be a better form of education than this?

The very best literature goes further still. Through its artistic representation of reality, it draws our attention to things we might otherwise miss, things we think we already know, revealing them to us as strange and new, unveiling the beauty of the ordinary. Indeed, a great work of literature opens our eyes to see the grandeur of what is and opens our ears to hear the echo of the infinite resounding through “ordinary” life, which, with a quickening of the heart, we realize isn’t ordinary at all but rather full of beauty, mystery, and wonder.