It was one of the more heart-rending contributions to the recent Great Books debate on X: “What does a ‘Great Books’ curriculum honestly look like, taking into account the Bell Curve reality in K-12 schools?” And it dovetails with the observation by Ann Manov in Harper’s Magazine that the new civics centers may have to compromise their reading expectations to attract students, or founder for lack of enrollments. Great Books programs were devised for college students who could be expected to read long books every week. That sort of college student now is a rarity.

How do you teach Great Books to students who have never read a book? Can it even be done?

Perhaps not. But if we are to try at all, it means that we must go back to first principles when we devise introductory Great Books courses for undergraduates. What is the first, most important thing that we want students to learn from the Great Books? If we can only assign 20 pages a week in a Great Books course, we must think very carefully indeed about what we want to assign.

Cue another lengthy debate. But I believe that the first thing we want to teach is the great stories of the West. Ideals, principles, values: these are too vague a ground for Great Books instruction. What makes a cultural tradition is the stories we share. The ideals are embedded in the stories anyway. But liberty means nothing without the story of Marathon; faith nothing without the stories of Joseph in Egypt and the Sermon on the Mount. We must teach our stories first. All else follows.

If you had asked the ancient Greeks what most needed to be passed on so that their spirit would live in a far land, among strange peoples, they would not have said the works of Plato and Aristotle. They would have said Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. And perhaps Hesiod’s Theogeny. Achilles at the walls of Troy is the heart of Greece, not the lecture notes of Aristotle’s students.

And then, too many of our students have become barbarians. They come to college knowing nothing of the West. Barbarians need stories as their first lessons. Medieval churches told illiterate peasants the stories of the Bible in marble and stained glass; we also need to tell stories to our postliterate children.

The next question is what stories to teach our students. The Bible’s stories must come first. Far too many young Americans know nothing of the Bible, and these stories are crucial for understanding two millennia of allusion and iconography. Genesis, Exodus, Luke, Acts: those would provide a core of the West’s sacred narratives.

Put D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths and Norse Myths on reserve at the college library. Our children should have read them in elementary school, but better late than never.

We Americans are not just children of the West, but children of England, an England that also was born of barbarians trying to understand the vanished, alien worlds of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. So we should teach some shorter Anglo-Saxon poems, such as “Caedmon’s Hymn” and “The Dream of the Rood”—and spend weeks going through Beowulf, England’s primordial epic.

Then, glimpses of the stories of Greece and Rome. Suetonius’ life of Julius Caesar, perhaps his Augustus. Some Lives of Plutarch—Pericles and Alexander. Plato’s Apology, not for the ideas, but for the story of Socrates’s trial.

And there ought to be one of the great stories: The Iliad, The Odyssey, or The Aeneid. Or even an excerpt from one of them. Those, even more than Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are the stories that need to be told. But what if students truly cannot read a long work? Well, perhaps one of the Greek dramas that tells an episode from the Trojan War, and thus provides at least a piece of Greece’s heart. I might choose Sophocles’ Ajax, perhaps the most Homeric of the classic Greek dramas. But something, no matter how brief, that students might read a scene from Greece’s oldest tale.

To teach the Great Books. At heart, it is not a scholarly avocation. It is to be a bard, a sceop, a teller of our tales. And perhaps we must learn to tell short ones, and hope they will catch the interest of those victims of our schools, our poor, untaught students.

It is not a good answer. But it may be the best one we have.

Follow David Randall on X.