Let the pages turn. Let the stories unfold!

Summer reading programs, as they are conceived these days, often come bundled with corporate slogans and anxious talk of “learning loss,” a phrase that seems to have emerged from the same think-tanks as “food insecurity” or “quantitative easing”—a way of naming a problem while quietly absolving those who caused it. 

 

Here at Cincinnati Classical Academy, we resist the spreadsheet logic that sees summer as a threat to be mitigated. We don’t treat June, July, and August as an academic no-man’s-land requiring the vigilant surveillance of apps and dashboards. No, for us, summer is not a vacuum but a vast and verdant literary meadow, a season for the mind to roam. Reading over the summer is not an emergency strategy to retain information; it is a vital and joyful part of a student’s formation, an invitation to take up again the Great Conversation, to lose oneself in narrative and thereby be found.

 

We are, as it were, a Back to the Books school, not as a branding exercise but as a philosophical stance. In the tradition of classical education, which stretches from Plato’s Academy through the medieval trivium and on to the curriculum of the Founding Fathers, books are not supplemental; they are central. The libri in liberal arts are not metaphorical. To be educated classically is to become intimate with the permanent things, those enduring realities that are best expressed in the great works of literature, philosophy, and history. We read, then, not simply to accumulate facts or “skills,” but to cultivate the moral imagination, that faculty which, as Edmund Burke reminds us, allows us to feel for others not because we are told to, but because we have been habituated to see the humanity in them.

 

This is why, at CLASSICAL, we do not treat books as disposable pedagogical tools, chosen on the basis of contemporary trends or an administrator’s whim. The texts in our curriculum are chosen with care, deliberation, and fidelity to a tradition that knows what children need—even when the culture does not. The stories we give to students are time-tested instruments for shaping the heart as well as the mind, for cultivating virtue as well as verbal reasoning. You will not find our literature program stitched together from this year’s top sellers on TeachersPayTeachers.com or the trending titles on a social justice reading list compiled in haste. You will find, instead, stories that breathe: Aesop’s fables, those moral engines of narrative simplicity; classical myths, heavy with symbolism and archetypal resonance; tales of King Arthur where courage, justice, and tragic error entwine; and American folktales like Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where dream and history play at the edges of a young republic’s soul.

You will find Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Rabbit, not as sentimental fluff but as works of serious whimsy—stories that teach children how to wonder. You will find Treasure Island and Alice in Wonderland, Heidi, Sherlock Holmes, Anne of Green Gables, and Robin Hood—narratives where character is fate, where virtue and vice are not gray mush but real possibilities with real consequences. These are not just “classic books”—they are classical tools, forming children in prudence, humility, courage, gratitude, perseverance, and compassion.

And in the high school years, the plunge deepens: Sophocles and Shakespeare, The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Hawthorne and Flannery O’Connor, Austen and Dickens, Twain and Melville, Dostoevsky and Orwell, Kafka and Solzhenitsyn. These are not just authors; they are interlocutors in the long philosophical struggle over what it means to be human. When a teenager wrestles with Raskolnikov or weeps with Prince Andrei, he is not merely decoding text, he is joining the species in its oldest task: to make sense of sorrow, freedom, beauty, sin, and grace.

And why stop at literature? In history, we read not just names and dates but narratives. Benjamin Franklin’s mischief and method, Frederick Douglass’s defiance, Anne Frank’s quiet faith, Machiavelli’s shadowed realism, Tocqueville’s clear-eyed liberty, Booker T. Washington’s steady climb. The classical mind, we believe, thrives on story. It longs not for information but for meaning. And that meaning is rarely delivered via summary bullet point or PowerPoint deck. It is earned through immersion in language.

But what of summer? Why not rest the mind, just for a little while? Because the classical tradition tells us something profound: that leisure—otium, in Latin—is not idleness, but a sacred space for contemplation. Aristotle tells us that leisure is the basis of culture. Josef Pieper reminds us that it is in leisure that we most resemble our Creator. Summer reading, then, is not a burdensome chore but a restoration of the soul. It is a chance to wander through the inner life while cicadas sing and porch swings creak. It is a chance to grow deeper in one’s humanity precisely when the world says to disengage.

So no—reading is not a tactic. It is a telos. And the good book, well-timed, can do more for a child’s soul than a thousand hours of data-driven instruction. Summer, too, is part of the curriculum. So let the pages turn. Let the stories unfold. Let the young minds follow where the good, the true, and the beautiful still live—in the kingdom of books.