The Ancient Texts That Teach You to Be Human
Reading the classics is a kind of learning that helps you become someone.
July 16, 2026
News
The Ancient Texts That Teach You to Be Human
The Atlantic • Elias Wachtel
In an age when artificial intelligence can master ever more “useful” skills, the ancient question returns with new force: What is education for? This reflection makes a timely case for the classics as more than knowledge to possess—as an encounter with enduring wisdom that helps shape the kind of human being a child may become.
Elias Wachtel
The Atlantic
Related Resources
_ZjunIz.png)
What the Seasons Can Teach Us About Work, Rest, and Raising Children with Kerry Hasler-Brooks
What if a flourishing family life depends less on doing more and more on recovering rhythms of work, rest, attention, and belonging? Christine Perrin talks with Dr. Kerry Hasler-Brooks about the life she and her family have built on a small Pennsylvania farm, where agricultural seasons make limits, dependence, and renewal impossible to ignore. Their conversation explores how parents can create room for boredom, Sabbath, reading, meaningful work, and life together, even without radically rearranging their circumstances. Kerry also reflects on technology, simplicity, literature, and the formative power of returning to the same places and texts over time. For families feeling crowded by schedules and competing demands, this conversation offers a hopeful vision of choosing what to value and making space to live accordingly. Along the way, Kerry considers the sustaining power of literature, from Zora Neale Hurston to Emily Dickinson, and the way reading can help us attend more deeply to ourselves, one another, the natural world, and God. Her reflections suggest that formation often happens through ordinary practices repeated faithfully: walking the same ground, rereading a beloved poem, sharing work with children, welcoming others, and protecting stretches of time in which nothing has been planned.
Living Like a Human with Elizabeth Lynn
What helps a child learn, a family flourish, or a community grow strong? Elizabeth Lynn suggests that the answer often begins with things that can seem almost invisible: order, repeated rhythms, presence, attention, and the willingness to delight in one another. In conversation with Christine Perrin, Elizabeth reflects on the “liturgy” of a classroom, the surprising gift of being known by name, and why beauty and rest depend on patterns that make room for genuine learning. She also considers the challenge many families know well: how to cultivate an inner life when the tempo of the world refuses to slow down. For Elizabeth, Scripture has become a lifelong anchor, calling her again and again toward humility, stillness, gratitude, and a life attentive to God and neighbor. Their conversation offers parents and educators a hopeful picture of formation. The small practices of showing up, praying for people by name, making room for wonder, and refusing to let busyness dictate our deepest commitments can slowly shape the atmosphere of a home, classroom, and community. It is a vision closely aligned with the Humanitas Institute’s commitment to education as formation through relationship, beauty, truth, goodness, and wonder.
Junius Johnson on Learning to See the World as Wild and Wonderful
How do fairy stories prepare children for a world of suffering, courage, beauty, and surprise? And what happens when adults lose the imagination to see rain, trees, music, and ordinary acts of making as anything more than useful resources? Dr. Junius Johnson joins Brian Williams to explore how fantasy gives us categories for facing real danger, recognizing evil, practicing courage, and remaining open to wonder. Drawing from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, The Neverending Story, and his own life as a musician and father, Junius argues that good stories do more than entertain us. They train our affections and help us become the kind of people who can enter the world with wisdom, desire, and hope. Their conversation moves from dragons and unicorns to grief, beauty, friendship, music, and the work of making. Along the way, Junius offers a practical invitation: read stories that enlarge your moral imagination, make something beautiful even when no one is watching, and resist the habit of calling the world “merely” ordinary.