By Cheri Blomquist, Ignatius Press, 2021 • 272 pages

The verdict: Learning to love good literature is a necessary step toward lifelong reading, understanding, and developing the moral imagination, and Blomquist’s work sets students on the right path.

WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS

Americans are reading less, and today’s students lack both the preparation and interest to reverse the trend. Lack of phonics instruction is part of the problem.

But another issue is that students are rarely assigned whole books—and when they are, the choices are often dull. This path kills students’ interest in reading before it ever begins. Young children who find that reading is boring will grow into adults who never crack open a book.

THE ARGUMENT

Blomquist argues that children should read great children’s literature before jumping into adult Great Books. In Before Austen Comes Aesop, she examines “the literature that has made the most profound impact on the lives of children throughout Western history.” The book is divided into two parts: “The Children’s Great Books” ( more on that later) and “Your Passport to Three Reading Adventures.” These “adventures” guide teachers and students through various approaches to teaching and enjoying literature, from book clubs and reading journals to more formal assessments. Also included is a useful appendix.

Blomquist’s list of recommended works begins with ancient times and ends with the late 20^th century, and it distinguishes between foundational works that should be prioritized and those that should only be considered. She includes a short synopsis of each work as well as some related virtues and themes. In addition to Aesop’s Fables (a must!), some of the important works on the list include the Bible, ancient mythology, Homer (adapted for children), nursery rhymes, legends (e.g. Robin Hood and King Arthur), Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Winnie-the-Pooh, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

WHAT WORKS

Blomquist’s basic premise is sound. Students should read Aesop (and a great many other works) before they are ready for Pride and Prejudice. Parents and schools should provide students with time-tested books, poems, and essays that feed the moral imagination—but keep them accessible to children.

Moreover, her list of recommended works, focused on a “Western Canon” for children, is mostly excellent. (Although I was surprised to see Rosemary Sutcliffe’s excellent retellings of The Odyssey, The Iliad, and Beowulf omitted, while some very obscure works from the Middle Ages were included.) Unlike many popular children’s book lists, it intentionally starts with books from ancient times through the early Middle Ages. She also digs deep. For example, instead of offering just one version of the Norse myths, she lists several, in order of maturity from middle grade to adult.

WHAT DOESN’T

Before Austen Comes Aesop addresses a narrow audience: the small number of parents or teachers who introduce difficult material too early, rather than the growing number of parents or educators who never introduce quality literature at all. The introduction makes this clear: Blomquist tells her own story of loving literature until asked to read Jude the Obscure in high school. But today, this experience is far from common. Most schools expect too little instead of too much from their students. Many don’t even assign whole books. While Blomquist’s list still applies to these schools and students, her framing of the issue will be alien to them.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Kids need books that connect them to truth, goodness, beauty, and tradition—but also a clear progression that builds toward more demanding works. Without that foundation, later encounters with the Great Books feel inaccessible or irrelevant. A coherent children’s canon introduces enduring stories, shared references, and moral questions that shape both literacy and cultural understanding.

Today, many students read fragmented excerpts or forgettable contemporary texts, weakening both skill and shared knowledge. Restoring time-tested children’s literature is a practical way to reverse that trend. Students nourished by fables, myths, and classic stories are far better prepared to engage seriously with the broader Western tradition, and far more likely to become lifelong readers.

THE BOTTOM LINE

From Austen to Aesop is a good starting place for teachers or homeschool parents looking to build a serious curriculum or home library of children’s literature. It is a beautiful invitation to take the first steps into great children’s literature.

WHY IT MATTERS

A generation taught to view Western civilization primarily as oppressive will struggle to understand the source of its own liberties. A free society cannot endure if its citizens are trained to despise the tradition that made freedom possible. And when students exercise rights they do not understand, they become less prepared to defend them, preserve them, or pass them on.

These anti-Western attitudes first found voice at Stanford University in the 1980s when Jesse Jackson led 500 protesters in the now-infamous chant, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” They complained that the program lacked diversity and demanded that Stanford end its introductory humanities program in “Western Culture,” then a graduation requirement. Since then, students have decried Western civilization as both a course of study and a cultural norm. Such courses rarely exist on today’s college campuses, leaving students woefully ignorant of the principles and traditions that comprise our intellectual inheritance. In fact, only 7% of Americans can name all five First Amendment rights.

If students still took Western Civ, they would learn that our rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances—all enshrined in the First Amendment—have roots in ancient Greece, the English legal system, and early colonial America. These rights did not emerge suddenly or accidentally; they developed over centuries through philosophical inquiry, legal precedent, and political struggle. A recent report from the Cato Institute documents that the first government to allow citizens to openly criticize the state was that of 5th-century Athens, which helped foster a culture of broad debate.

English legal tradition also informs our system of expressive rights. Our rights to petition and assembly can be traced to Chapter 61 of the Magna Carta, which established a mechanism for subjects to hold the king accountable. By the 15th century, English subjects routinely gathered to present collective petitions to the king or Parliament. These practices normalized the idea that people could assemble peacefully to express political grievances. The rights to petition and assembly were codified in the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which also included the right to free speech within Parliament. This was admittedly a limited application, but it paved the way for broader rights in the future. Unfortunately, most Americans do not know this history.

That’s because this history of expressive rights is rarely taught in high school or college classrooms. As a result, many student protesters exercise these rights without appreciating how precious, hard-won, and historically rare they are. They may take for granted freedoms that emerged only through centuries of intellectual and legal refinement. We should instead teach students that it’s no accident of history that Americans enjoy the expressive rights codified in our First Amendment. We have the legal traditions of Western civilization to thank for such rights, and they deserve both understanding and stewardship.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A society cannot preserve liberties it no longer understands. Restoring serious instruction in the Western tradition, through general education requirements and civics curricula, would ensure that students are equipped to understand, defend, and responsibly exercise their own rights, rather than trampling on the tradition that afforded them.

A shocking number of Americans don’t know or understand their own country or its constitutional traditions. This ignorance is especially true of young people. At every level, our schools fail to deliver adequate civic knowledge. Primary documents are one remedy to civic ignorance. Every student should start with these:

1. The Declaration of Independence: Without the Declaration of Independence, there would be no American Experiment. This document, penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, asserted our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while establishing that those rights come from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” — not from government. It further asserted that power comes from the consent of the governed. Careful reading of the colonies’ list of grievances can awaken students to the rights they take for granted today.

2. The U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights: These documents provide the structure of American government — as well as its limitations. Close reading of the Constitution demonstrates to students the balance of power necessary to safeguard our liberties and also sows appreciation of the deliberate process created by America’s founders to limit and decentralize power. The Constitution also reveals the philosophical foundations of our republic, including the rule of law, due process, and federalism. All are built into the delicate design of the Constitution itself.

3. Federalist Papers No. 10: If students can only read one of the Federalist Papers, it should be Number 10 by James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution.” In it, Madison argues that only a large federal government can “control the violence of faction” and prevent the tyranny of the majority. Especially pertinent as Americans become more divided, this essay advises that since differences of opinion are “sown in the nature of man,” we must learn to live together in a carefully constructed pluralist society.

4. The Gettysburg Address: Abraham Lincoln’s short remarks following the Battle of Gettysburg have become one of the most famous speeches in American history. More importantly, Lincoln calls our “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” an “unfinished work.” Lincoln’s words emphasize that American ideals, especially the idea of “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” are worth preserving and advancing even in the face of human moral failings.

5. Letter From Birmingham Jail: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous letter from his Alabama jail cell is a powerful call for justice and “constitutional and God-given rights” for all Americans. Despite its calls for change, the letter is a defense of the principles that shaped our founding. King also outlines the process for nonviolent protest against injustice. His template of fact-finding, negotiation, and direct action is a wise guide for today’s students, who often erroneously believe that censorship and violence are appropriate answers to offensive speech.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In order for students to appreciate and appropriately exercise their rights, privileges, and responsibilities as American citizens, they must first understand them. States should make this civic understanding a priority by adopting legislation modeled on the REACH Act, which requires all public university students to take a civics course grounded in primary documents.

The core disagreement: Matejko’s recommended book list focuses on contemporary, and likely fleeting, leftist preoccupations rather than timeless truths. Students should read Great Books instead of recent bestsellers.

WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT

In her introduction, Matejko encourages students to read widely, “consider broad perspectives,” and to treat her recommended books as “conversation starters” rather than definitive answers. This is sound advice, reflecting an admirable openness to inquiry. College is a rare season in life when students have both the time and the supportive environment to immerse themselves in serious reading. Matejko’s general advice acknowledges this ideal.

WHERE THEY GO WRONG

Instead of focusing on “the best that has been thought and said,” Matejko’s list of recommended books is almost exclusively contemporary and ideological. She fails to follow through on her own advice about reading broadly. For example, the first book on the list is How to Be a (Young) Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Nic Stone. The book, published in 2023, is one of several on this list that focus on the modern preoccupation of structural racism in America. Others include Dear Martin (also by Nic Stone) and The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. All three were written within the last ten years. The same pattern emerges in the books included about modern feminism.

C.S. Lewis addressed the downsides of this approach in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. He notes, first, that “A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of … thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.” Lewis also reminds readers that “Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes.” Students in particular must heed this advice, since they are not yet experts in the subjects they are encountering. They are fish who don’t realize that they’re wet.

THE REAL STORY

Lewis provides a solution to the problem he propounds. “We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” He continues, “the only palliative,” to the dogmas and blindnesses of our own age, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” Lewis recommends that students read one old book after each new one. In other words, students should read Great Books—the foundational works of literature, philosophy, history, and science that have shaped civilization and continue to illuminate enduring questions about truth, virtue, beauty, and the human condition. These books have endured across generations, slowly building a “Great Conversation” among the most influential ideas of every era.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Students should seek the “clean sea breeze of the centuries” as an antidote to modern dogma. The books they read shape their understanding and opinions of themselves, their country, and the wider world. Reading only from narrow, contemporary works risks leaving them with a distorted understanding of their own civilization and its achievements. Students may come away fluent in critique but unfamiliar with the intellectual inheritance they are critiquing, including its arguments, aspirations, and internal debates. Without that grounding, students’ judgment becomes shallow and historically untethered. And a civilization cannot survive if its heirs never learn what made it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Students preparing for college should read books that have stood the test of time, not merely those that reflect the passing concerns of the present moment. Great Books connect students to the long conversation of civilization and sharpen their judgment. If students want to understand the world they are entering, they should begin with the books that helped build it.

WHY IT MATTERS

Today’s fact-free students will become tomorrow’s poorly informed leaders, teachers, and citizens. What kind of society do we expect to build—or sustain—when the expectations for the students in our education system is at an all-time low?

Most schools today encourage “critical thinking,” inviting students to build rhetorical skills, decode documents, apply methods and form opinions before students have learned the underlying content. Students are asked to engage without understanding. For example, students might be asked to “evaluate arguments” without knowing basic historical facts. This skills-first approach has left little room for passing down essential knowledge.

These practices mean that students often have strong emotional responses to current events, but not nearly enough context. One illustration is how often students repeat political slogans without understanding the basic geography or history behind them. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that “only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan [“From the river to the sea”] were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic.”

Civic knowledge is also low. A 2024 survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that “70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices, and other basic functions of our democracy.” This knowledge deficit is strongly linked to educational policies that focus too narrowly on skills, minimize achievement, and allow students to progress without mastery. You probably have heard teachers complain about “teaching to the test,” with cumbersome requirements teachers must adhere to while frequently being forced to ignore more meaningful, fact-based content.

This lack of knowledge is a disaster for public discourse. But it is also detrimental to building the very “critical thinking” skills that schools promise to provide. Facts are the essential building blocks of deep understanding. T.A. Van Dijk and W. Kintsch explain that one of the major contributions of psychology is the understanding that “much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the text itself but must be drawn from the language user’s knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs, or events the discourse is about.”

In other words, readers can’t properly understand even a newspaper article if they don’t already have a considerable number of facts at hand. That’s why it’s so important that schools bring back the teaching of substantive content and expect students to master it.

Doing so would mean teaching a coherent sequence of history, geography, and civics, along with a return to memorization of key facts and the use of frequent quizzes to enforce retention. Schools should also adopt reading built around shared cultural references and insist on student mastery before advancement. That’s not to say that we abandon skills, but students must have concrete knowledge before they can engage in higher-order thinking.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The preservation of our republic depends on having a well-educated citizenry. Schools must get back to teaching content knowledge—and expect mastery. As John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, wisdom and knowledge “diffused generally among the body of the people, [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.”

Jenna A. Robinson, Senior Editor of Education at Restoring the West, is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Follow her on X @jarobinson1.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Chief Editor of Restoring the West and a leading writer on freedom, religion, and Western civilization. After fleeing Somalia to escape a forced marriage, she built a life in the Netherlands and served as a Member of Parliament. Her journey from Islam to atheism and ultimately to Christianity informs her perspective on faith, education, and the future of the West.

In this discussion, Ayaan explains how her education at Leiden University introduced her to the philosophical and religious traditions that shaped Western civilization. She argues that universities must once again teach students to examine ideas critically, understand their intellectual inheritance, and develop the moral confidence necessary to sustain a free society.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

RtW: Tell me about your own education. How did you come to embrace classical liberal values?

AHA: I am deeply grateful to my professors at the University of Leiden. From 1995 to 2000, they introduced me to classical liberalism and other key political philosophies. They also exposed me to the ideas that shaped the West, like Greek and Roman thought and Christianity. My education at Leiden eventually helped me see, many years later, that Christianity was the foundation of classical liberalism. By the 20^th century, it seemed that Christianity and classical liberalism had separated.

When I was a student at Leiden, I became an atheist and saw myself as a classical liberal. Through the study of history, politics, and philosophy, I have traced my classical liberalism back to its roots: the Bible. At Leiden, I was introduced to the idea of socialism and all its different manifestations, including communism. By 2001, when 9/11 happened, I was able to clearly see that this terror attack had an ideological root, and through due diligence and critical thinking, I was able to compare it to other ideas and then reach the conclusions I have reached.​

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The core disagreement: When you amplify the voices of only a cross-section of higher education’s customers, a skewed picture emerges, cloaking the true state of our universities—and our nation’s future.

WHAT THEY GOT RIGHT

A recent parentPOLL published by Art & Science Group, LLC accurately reports that most parents of recent college graduates are happy with their children’s decisions to attend. Eighty-three percent of these mothers and fathers, in fact, believe that college is “worth it.” A further 73 percent “report they would have made the same decisions about their child’s college experience.”

WHERE THEY GO WRONG

The poll is a classic example of survivorship bias. By solely surveying the parents of college graduates, e.g., success stories, parentPOLL significantly distorts a real problem: whether the educational juice is worth the financial, civic, and cultural squeeze. The pollsters even claim to have debunked the two “myths” that the “college cost outweighs its value to students” and “higher education is broken and needs significant reform.”

That, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, is theorizing ahead of your data. How a select group of parents feels about college tells little about the opinions of Americans in general, including parents of dropouts and those who never attended college, as well as young people themselves. It reveals even less about colleges’ actual performance.’

When all Americans are canvassed, a different picture emerges. According to a 2025 Gallup poll, the “perceived importance of college” has hit “a new low.” Only 35 percent of Americans say that a college education is “very important,” down from 75 percent in 2010. Moreover, a majority of Americans don’t expect things to quickly improve. A 2025 Pew Research poll showed that 70 percent of Americans believe higher education is “going in the wrong direction.” Interestingly, this expectation holds true for both Republicans (77 percent) and Democrats (65 percent).

THE REAL STORY

When viewed as a whole, Americans are clearly no longer embracing a college education as universally healthy for their young people, instead questioning academic track records on free speech and viewpoint diversity. Forty-six percent of survey respondents, for instance, say that universities do a “fair/poor” job of “providing opportunities for students to express their own opinions.” Forty-five percent, meanwhile, say they do a “fair/poor” job of “exposing students to a wide range of opinions.”

Young Americans are also expressing their lack of faith in universities by choosing not to enroll. Just 62.8 percent of 2024 high school graduates chose to attend colleges or universities in the following year, down from 70.1 percent in 2009.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Incomplete data obfuscates real problems in American higher education. Yes, most graduates (and their parents) are happy with their choices, likely to enter productive careers, out-earn degree-less peers, and eventually pay off student loans. Yet with the average graduation rate hovering around 60 percent, many students will not experience that success, often carrying debt but no credential to show for it.

What’s more, colleges often tolerate or encourage illiberal behavior and norms. Focusing on whether graduates are “happy” with their academic decisions ignores whether their learned illiberalism is positive for the country carrying a significant portion of higher education’s tab.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Higher education does not exist merely to satisfy those who succeed within its walls; instead, it is meant to prepare citizens, cultivate intellectual seriousness, and justify the public investment it receives. When nearly half the country questions whether universities uphold free expression or provide genuine intellectual diversity—among other issues—complacency is irresponsible. Honest accounting is therefore crucial for academic renewal.

Jenna A. Robinson, Senior Editor of Education at Restoring the West, is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Follow her on X @jarobinson1.