One Simple Way To Raise Children To Be Leaders
Whether they admit it or not, almost every parent entertains visions of greatness for their child from the moment he is born. He’ll be a businessman, or a college professor, or maybe even the President of the United States.
Unfortunately, it’s often hard to move beyond daydreams and work toward making those imaginations become reality. Yet in spite of this difficulty, author and former college president Ben Sasse suggests that is exactly the job of every parent: to raise children “as if they’ll rule someday.”
According to Sasse, one practical way of raising future leaders is by creating a list of essential books for your children to read by the time they reach adulthood. In essence, this list becomes a “family canon,” and should include books influential in the parents’ lives, as well as ones which present concepts which shape society as we know it today.
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Sasse and his wife took up this challenge, seeking to limit their list to under 60 titles in a wide variety of areas, including religion, fiction, science, history, and so on. The following list was the result [Note: Hyperlinked titles are those referenced elsewhere on Intellectual Takeout]:
- Long Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela
- Letters and Papers from Prison– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail – Martin Luther King Jr.
- Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
- Orthodoxy– G.K. Chesterton
- Christianity and Liberalism – J. Gresham Machen
- Being Digital – Nicolas Negroponte
- Moneyball – Michael Lewis
- Commentary on Galatians – Martin Luther
- The Institutes of the Christian Religion – John Calvin
- Ethics – Aristotle
- Crito – Plato
- The Odyssey – Homer
- History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
- Three Theban Plays – Sophocles
- Confessions – Augustine
- Why God Became Man – Anselm of Canterbury
- Bondage of the Will – Martin Luther
- Summa Theologica – Thomas Aquinas
- Canterbury Tales– Geoffrey Chaucer
- Emile – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Romeo and Juliet– Shakespeare
- Hamlet– Shakespeare
- King Lear – Shakespeare
- Julius Caesar– Shakespeare
- Macbeth – Shakespeare
- Sonnets – Shakespeare
- The Declaration of Independence
- Constitution
- The Federalist Papers– Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
- Democracy in America– Alexis de Tocqueville
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave– Frederick Douglass
- Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858
- Politics – Aristotle
- Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
- The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 – Charles Sellers
- Free to Choose – Milton and Rose Freidman
- Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
- Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
- Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
- The Road to Serfdom – F. A. Hayek
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- 1984 – George Orwell
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- On the Nature of Things – Lucretius
- Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn
- Elements of Geometry – Euclid
- Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
- Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
- Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Sasse goes on to say:
> “Whether you start out with the above list as an opening bid or choose to go another direction completely, the most important thing is to read early and often, and impart that habit to your children, too. …
> If a whole generation grows up having become habituated to reading, then even if we don’t start them off with the same readings, we’ll have prepared and positioned them to enter into meaningful wrestling with their neighbors about a core set of texts that we should tackle together. Both their preparedness and their empathetic debating will strengthen our shared ability to stand in the face of the forces seeking to pull us apart.”
What do you think of Sasse’s list? Are there titles that you would add or take away? If so, why?
