Hooten Wilson, Jessica and Stratman, Jacob. Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds That Came Before. Zondervan Academic, 2022.
Pride is a perennial sin that easily besets me. (Perhaps one or two who read this will be able to relate). One remedy I’ve found to counteract my pride is to read widely and deeply from great books, for it is very difficult to admire my own intelligence when it is so thoroughly dwarfed by great minds like Plato, Dante, and Chesterton. When all three of these great thinkers show up in the same book, along with 40 other towering intellects from Lao Tzu in ancient China to Wendell Berry in modern America, I am wonderfully overwhelmed by their brilliance and readily recognize my own nothingness. Such was my experience reading Jessica Hooten Wilson and Jacob Stratman’s classical anthology, Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Heart and Minds that Came Before.
Learning the Good Life is an anthology of classical thinkers spanning nearly 2500 years. The reading selections represent some of the most important literary, philosophical, and theological contributions of Eastern and Western civilizations, and are selected for their contribution to the debate on what it means to live a good life. Each selection is introduced briefly by a trusted scholar who contextualizes it within its historical moment and broader conversation, helping to orient the reader to the excerpt. Concluding each reading is a list of several questions designed for group discussion.
Learning the Good Life would be a helpful companion to all classical educators, whether they be charter, private, or homeschoolers. It offers an expansive view of the tradition we are learning and teaching in, as well as practical ways to improve personal devotional practices in living the good life.
To give readers a sense of the expansive view the book provides and the quality of each selection, consider the second chapter on Confucius introduced by Ravi Jain. Though the book and each introduction are written within the context of the Christian worldview, the selections are not exclusively Christian or religious. The editors seem happy and eager to recognize the truth wherever they can find it and do not limit their search to Christian theologians. In doing so they focus on what the different religious and ethical traditions have in common, which in this case is the proposition that “virtue…is its own reward” and “right living and right thinking lead to happiness” (15). Jain explains that for Confucius, virtuous living was summed up in the multilayered term Tao or The Way which he characterizes as “the eternal moral wisdom, which leads to human flourishing.”
The actual excerpt Jain provides for us is from The Analects or The Sayings of Confucius. In reading it, those who have neglected Eastern philosophy as I have will be pleased to find it accessible and even familiar, for it is similar to the book of Proverbs and other wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible. They used words more efficiently back then, for every line is filled with principled truths made memorable by their concise yet artful articulation. Here are a few such lines:
“He who rules by moral force is like the pole-star, which remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it.”
“He who by reanimating the Old can gain knowledge of the New is fit to be a teacher.”
“When you know a thing, to recognize that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it. That is knowledge.”
While in some ways this ancient wisdom literature is easy to read because of its simplicity and brevity, in some ways it is more difficult because one line requires significant time pondering. To aid in this, the discussion questions at the end of the chapter encourage readers to slow down and reflect rather than barrel ahead to the next chapter. In fact, one of the questions helped me make the connection between Confucius and the Hebrew wisdom writers by asking, “Does Confucius feel familiar to you or more foreign? Does he seem similar or different to other ancient cultures you have studied, such as the Greeks, Hebrews, and Romans?” (25). And while these discussion questions are best explored in community with others reading the book, they serve well as personal writing prompts in a commonplace book for more independent learners.
The one criticism I have of the book is not about any of the introductions, selections, or questions. It is the fact that it is an anthology—a book of excerpts—that irritated me a little. Reading it took me back to the semesters of college reading I did from anthologies that were only parts of The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Ethics. Back then what I needed was someone to tell me to read the whole book, not fool me into thinking I knew what it meant because I read and wrote an “A” paper on part of it.
But, as I’ve thought about this critique, I’ve concluded it is not so much a criticism of the book as a criticism of myself. For I am too impatient and prideful as a reader, as I’ve previously confessed, and I do not readily recognize the invitation anthologies are to further reading. About halfway through reading Learning the Good Life, I recognized this mistake and changed my attitude, which made all the difference. I thought of each scholar introducing each excerpt as a friend encouraging me to read the full work, pointing me to their favorite parts as an incentive to read it in full. I then became less apprehensive of picking up the bigger work as I saw how accessible and interesting they were.
In this spirit, I recommend Learning the Good Life as an essential addition to any classical teacher’s library to help them discover their next classic to read fully.
Ross Garner is a 12th Grade Humanities mentor at John Adams Academy in Roseville, California. He was home-schooled in the classical style with his five siblings, attended a classical charter school, and studied at a liberal arts college in Utah. He has a BA and MA in American Studies from Brigham Young University and Utah State University with an emphasis in political science and American religious history. He loves to garden, serve in his church, and read The Chronicles of Narnia to his two children, whom he home-schools with his wife, Amanda.