• Not just in the modern world, but for all time, our life is pulled by distractions. The most fundamental question for education is: What is truly worth our time and attention?
• Education is not just about preparing students for jobs; it’s forming their souls by focusing their attention for 10,000 hours—the time spent in the classroom for 12 of the most impressionable years of their lives.

• Classical educators love old things: old books, old music, old ideas.
• This puts classical education at odds with modernity, which often sees the old as outdated or irrelevant.
• The "Lindy Effect": The longer something has lasted, the longer it is likely to last. Things that endure have proven their value.

• A critical distinction: "Not everything old is good, and not everything good is old."
• Some things have a quality — let’s call it “deep goodness” — that is rare, precious, and hard to identify.
• We value things because they are old *and* have been consistently identified as deeply good.
  (Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Partita for 8 Voices by Caroline Shaw)

• Time is a great filter. Most bad old things have been forgotten. Most good old things have been forgotten too!.
• HOWEVER, the relatively tiny percentage of old things that have stuck around have been preserved for a reason: deeply good
• Examples: Sacred Scripture!
• The works of Homer, Virgil, and Dante
• The architecture and sculpture of the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines.
• The films of Chaplin, Tarkovsky
• Recent works such as Tolkien, Lewis, Sherlock Holmes... still 'on trial' but they can be 'instant classics.'

• A challenge: That which is deeply good is often hard to identify, and hard to love at first.

'Can you be righteous', asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.' St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in 'ordinate affections' or 'just sentiments' will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.

In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart... when Reason at length comes to him... he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.'

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

• This principle applies to relationships, too. Marriage and lifelong friendships are harder to cultivate than shallow acquaintances, but the reward is a profound and lasting bond that shallow friendships cannot offer.

• How do we learn to love what is difficult but good?
• Humility requires we admit *don't* yet love the deeply good (at least not enough)
• Humble, patient repetition. We read the great books again and again.
• "Staring, soaking" (contemplation) The water contemplates the coffee bean
• Through this discipline, our tastes are changed and our affections are ordered toward the good.
• Anecdotess: Duke Ellington, Beethoven, green smoothies.

"In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match,...Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life."

"Secondly, the majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called ‘reading oneself to sleep’. They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, with listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention.

Thirdly, the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before."

- C.S. Lewis

• Basic skills—math, language, history, grammar—are foundational. But they aren’t “the point.” Neither is “getting a job” the point!
• These skills develop the mind so that it is able to appreciate the deeply good. This is a practical necessity. Being a good employee, parent, and member of society requires that we love what is truly good.

• If we read the Bible, we can't be caught up too much in modern fads. It is old and deeply good!
• We read the Church Fathers out of a love for Truth, not simply a love for the old. We read Scripture and the Fathers because they are deeply good!

• At a classical Christian school, we work on purifying the passions and illuminating the mind and heart through prayer, fasting, confession, and forgiveness.
• This is why a classical education is so well integrated with the life of the Church: Sunday worship, daily prayers, and book learning.

• It humbles us to trust in time-tested wisdom.
• It gives us access to that which is deeply good, forming our love in the present and expanding our joy.
• It provides a stable vantage point from which to judge the fleeting ideas of the present.
• Along with life in the Church, it grounds all learning in Christ, “in whom are all things”.