We live in an age of unprecedented information and unprecedented confusion. We are a civilization that has mastered the how of nearly everything while losing its grip on the what and the why.

The examined life is the ancient remedy. Socrates staked his life on the conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living; Augustine discovered that the restless heart finds no rest until it rests in God; and the long tradition of classical Christian education has insisted, across two and a half millennia, that formation in wisdom and virtue is the proper end of every human life and every humane institution.

This six-week course invites adults—especially parents of classically educated students—into that tradition.

Drawing on Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture & the Great Conversation (Roman Roads Press, 2026) as its primary text, and supplemented by the voices of Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Richard Weaver, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others who have shaped the classical Christian mind, each session moves the student from cultural diagnosis to classical resource to personal application. The course follows the natural arc of the book itself: from anthropology and epistemology, through the Transcendentals and the liberal arts, to the applied cultural judgments that a genuinely formed person is equipped to make.

By the end of six weeks, students will not only know more about classical Christian education; they will have begun to inhabit it.

Week 1 — Made for More: The Anthropological Foundations of Classical Education What kind of creature is a human being, and what is he for? Before any other educational question can be answered rightly, this one must be asked honestly. Drawing on Becoming Classically Educated's opening essays on the nature of classical Christian education and the crisis of identity in the postmodern age, this session establishes the governing conviction of the entire course: that human beings are imago dei—image-bearers made for wisdom, virtue, and the knowledge of God—and that every educational philosophy tells the truth about what it actually believes humanity to be.

Week 2 — Live Not by Lies: Truth, the Logos, and the Life of the Mind In a culture rife with propaganda, therapeutic half-truths, and the corrosive acid of relativism, the ability to apprehend and love truth is not an intellectual luxury; it is an act of moral courage and a condition of genuine freedom. This session takes up the essay "Toward a More Certain Knowledge of the Truth," tracing the history of Western thought on truth from Aristotle and Aquinas to the Incarnational Logos, and asks what it means to build one's intellectual life on the conviction that Truth is not merely a proposition to be mastered but a Person to be known.

Week 3 — The Examined Life: The Good, the Good Life, and the Ordering of Desire What is the good life, and who gets to define it? The great tradition answers with eudaimonia—the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue—while the modern world quietly substitutes self-actualization, therapeutic comfort, and the unbounded pursuit of subjective happiness. This session works through the longest and most culturally ambitious essay in Becoming Classically Educated, tracing the concept of the good from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine's ordo amoris to the American founding and its contemporary distortions, asking students to examine their own loves honestly and order them toward what is genuinely worth wanting.

Week 4 — Words Create Worlds: Language, Beauty, and the Liberating Arts Classical education is, at its root, a language-centered education, not only because words are instruments of communication, but because they are, in the deepest sense, constitutive of reality. This session draws on the essays "Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds" and "Toward a Recovery of Beauty" to argue that the liberal arts are not an ornament on the edifice of education but its very foundation, the disciplines by which a human being learns to perceive truth, love goodness, and recognize beauty as objective realities rather than private preferences.

Week 5 — Into the Great Conversation: Reading, the Canon, and the Antilibrary The Great Books are not intimidating artifacts to be admired from a respectful distance; they are interlocutors, discussion partners who speak from outside the narrow prejudices of the present and correct the characteristic errors of the age precisely because they come from beyond it. This session takes up Becoming Classically Educated's essays on tsundoku, the nature of great books, and the art of reading, asking what it means to build a genuine reading life rather than a reading habit. It further examines what stands between most of us and the books we have always meant to read.

Week 6 — Bringing Order to Disorder: Science, Justice, History, and the Rule of Life The classically educated person is not formed for the library alone. He is formed to bring ordered judgment to a disordered age: to engage science without scientism, to pursue justice without sentimentality, and to read history as more than the chronicle of whoever happened to win. This final session draws on Becoming Classically Educated's essays on science, justice, and history, and culminates in a personal commission: a Rule of Life suited to the student's own vocation, season, and temperament. Together, we will contrive a set of rhythms and practices that, sustained over time, make wisdom not merely an aspiration but a way of living.

Course Objectives
Upon completing The Examined Life, students will be able to:

• Articulate the anthropological convictions that distinguish classical Christian education from its modern alternatives, and identify where those convictions are challenged by contemporary culture.
• Engage the classical and Christian tradition's account of the Transcendentals (i.e., Truth, Goodness, and Beauty) as an integrated vision for education, culture, and the life of the mind.
• Read primary sources in the Great Tradition with greater confidence, charity, and critical discernment (i.e., enter the Great Conversation as participants rather than spectators).
• Apply classical and Christian categories of analysis to (i.e., think Christainly about) contemporary cultural disorders in science, justice, history, and public discourse with rigor and grace.
• Construct a personal Rule of Life oriented toward sustained intellectual and spiritual formation, grounded in regular reading, ordered attention, and intentional community.

Required text: Becoming Classically Educated: Humane Letters on Education, Culture & the Great Conversation, Scott Postma, ed. (Roman Roads Press, 2026). Available at romanroadspress.com. Additional texts will be supplied by the instructor in PDF form.