5 Reasons You Should Care What Your Kids Are Reading

There are as many reasons to read great literature as there are great books themselves. Here are five of them:

1. Great literature will improve your love life

Whatever kind of love you can imagine — mother and child; brothers-in-arms; husband and wife; Creator and creation — someone has taken up his pen and captured the experience with insight and eloquence, offering readers a key to make sense of and navigate every stage and state of the human heart. 

For the young man in the throes of new and uncertain love, Jane Austen offers: “No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.” For the friends tethered by shared minds and moments, Edith Wharton says: “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.” And for the widow in the torment of love lost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes one of the most anguished stanzas in all of poetry: 

And in despair I bowed my head

“There is no peace on earth,” I said,

“For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Great literature shows us how to love and be loved. It articulates what would otherwise bewilder and clarifies that which often gets muddied and muddled within the recesses of our hearts. 

2. Great literature unlocks the vault

There is none so trapped as one who cannot make himself understood; more relationships are imprisoned by miscommunication than spite. John Donne once wrote: “To know and feel all this, and not to have [w]ords to express it, makes a man a grave of his own thoughts.” Happily, avid readers need not suffer this fate, because great literature not only untangles and reveals, but also teaches us how to express. The person who carefully reads Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice will soon find herself increasingly adept at formulating and verbalizing the nuances of her own thoughts, simply because she is immersed in the pages of one of the most brilliant writers of all time.

3. Good readers dream better

Great literature inspires its readers to probe both the core and outskirts of reality. Good books grapple with intense and sometimes frantic questions. They test faith and explore the boundaries of existence itself. And while they do not always come out the other side with answers, they invariably produce a richer and more precise understanding of the questions asked. A good reader, in turn, will springboard from those questions to others of his own making, his mind flourishing and imagination mushrooming. He will begin to dream anew and with ever more expansive notions of the possible, as the life of the mind steadily grows wider and deeper.

4. Great literature gives flight to the soul

The soul flies on hope, and hope is nourished on great literature: Every good book is evidence that one more idea is worth exploring, one novel question worth asking, one greater depth of truth worth plumbing.

Moreover, great literature focuses our minds on higher concerns: Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. Some writers draw a straight line from us to these transcendentals; some take back and twisted roads. Ernest Hemingway jolts us: “[t]here is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”  William Shakespeare exposes us: “what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” Anne Frank inspires us: “I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”

Whatever their style or subject, great writers elevate us beyond ourselves.

5. Words redeem the world 

That anguished stanza was not the last word of Longfellow’s poem. Widowed for two years, his son critically wounded in a skirmish, and his country savagely torn apart by war, Longfellow spilled his agony onto paper, working through his tortured thoughts and broken heart, finally emerging triumphant: 

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

    The Wrong shall fail,

    The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

All great literature ultimately guides us, whether by attraction or repulsion, to the One who is Beauty Himself. 

For these and countless other reasons, we at LGA are prepared to nurture our students’ love of reading from the moment they step into class through graduation.