This is, perhaps, the most common and most reasonable question.

In a world shaped by technology, specialization, and rapid change, it can seem impractical to spend time reading Homer or Shakespeare or St. Augustine. Surely, the argument goes, students would be better served by focusing narrowly on technical skills that translate directly into a job.

But this assumes something that is not quite true: that the modern workforce is made up primarily of specialists doing purely technical work.  The modern economy does not simply run on code; it runs on people who can understand, organize, and communicate complex ideas across disciplines.

According to the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs Report”, the most in-demand skills are not narrowly technical. They include:

• Analytical thinking

• Complex problem-solving

• Critical thinking

• Creativity and originality

• Leadership and social influence

(Technical skills, notably, rank lower on the list and are often more easily automated or outsourced.)

These are not incidental skills in a classical education—they are its central aim.

A student trained in the Socratic method learns to listen carefully, speak clearly, and follow an argument wherever it leads. A student formed by history, philosophy, literature, and theology learns how to synthesize information, discern what matters, and make sound judgments.

This question also assumes something else that is not true: that liberal arts graduates (the collegiate approximation to a Classical Education) don’t succeed at the same rate as their more technically specialized peers. 

The evidence suggests that they do.

• A study by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) found that while liberal arts graduates may start with slightly lower salaries, they often catch up to and surpass their peers in earnings over time, especially in leadership roles.

• Analysis from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that liberal arts graduates are employed across a wide range of fields, including business, education, law, and management—not confined to any single track.

• It is also frequently noted that a significant percentage of CEOs hold degrees in the liberal arts. While exact figures vary by study, estimates often suggest that well over half of top executives do not have undergraduate degrees in business or technical fields, but in disciplines like history, philosophy, or literature.

Why might this be?

Because leadership is not primarily a technical problem. It is a human one.

One speaker at a recent Chesterton conference put it this way: his first employer hired him because of his Great Books background, not in spite of it—on the assumption that “if you can understand philosophy, you can understand business.”

That may sound surprising, until we consider what many jobs actually require.

To work in fields like business, marketing, management, or entrepreneurship, one must learn to:

• understand complex systems

• synthesize different kinds of information

• communicate persuasively

• exercise judgment amid uncertainty

• lead conversations, not just follow instructions

These are not “extra” skills. They are the work itself.

As one job description from a leading communications firm put it, they are looking for someone who can: “uncover essential truths, make the complex simple, and make the invisible visible.”

That is a description of a classically educated mind.

The last, but perhaps the most consequential, presumption that this question implies is that the most technically-educated and specialized professionals have achieved their expertise only after having disavowed and abstained from any sort of great books education. That embracing a career in STEM requires a denigration of the Classics. 

My evidence against this binary is perhaps more anecdotal, but I have seldom found this to be the case. Often the most technically-minded, successful professionals tend to also be the most well-read. If I see I book on coding on a bookshelf, books on philosophy and theology are almost always close by. 

Earlier in my career, while employed at a software company, I still remember a conversation I had with the man in charge of our company's databases. In describing his job, he said to me “A database scheme is simply an ontology which defines the concepts a system is capable of thinking about.” 

Ontology is a philosophical discipline that studies both what exists and what kinds of things exist. The term is a combination of two greek words; ‘ontos’ (being) and ‘logos’ (‘word’ or ‘discourse’) though the actual concept ‘ontology’ was not coined until the much later, German Scholastic tradition. 

This man clearly knew his metaphysics. If this man had been alive in Ancient Rome, he would have built and designed aqueducts, if he had been alive in medieval Europe, he would have erected cathedrals; he happened to be a denizen of the 21st century, and so he became the designer of databases. The vocations have changed, but the curiosity and sharpness of mind have remained the same. Just like the architects and engineers of antiquity, his education had trained the whole person. 

A classical education does not reject science, mathematics, or technology; it teaches them as part of a larger whole.

But it does resist the idea that education should be reduced to immediate utility.

A narrowly trained student may be well-prepared for a first job. But industries change. Technologies evolve. Entire fields appear and disappear within a decade. When a student is formed in how to think, how to learn, and how to discern, such a student is prepared not just for one career, but for many.

You may have heard the familiar answer: “A great book is one that has withstood the test of time.” Like many clichés, this contains a grain of truth but is, ultimately, an insufficient definition. Longevity alone cannot bear the full weight of what we mean by a “Great” book. It is not difficult to imagine a work of popular fiction like The Harry Potter Series remaining widely read a century from now. And yet, without intending any slight to Ms. Rowling, endurance in the marketplace is not quite the same thing as greatness in the classical sense. (We at Chesterton Academy of the Divine Mercy, for what it’s worth, have no quarrel with Harry Potter; indeed, we even have a house system; just like Hogwarts!)

A better definition is not tied merely to how long a book survives, but to the kind and depth of the influence it exerts. A great book is one that has become part of the very DNA of Western civilization. It is not simply read; it is inherited. It is one of the load-bearing beams in the structure of our common life. Remove it, and something essential collapses.

One might think of The Great Books as individual blocks in a great and precarious Jenga tower; none can be pulled out without bringing the whole structure down with them. These are the books that have shaped not only what we think, but the very way in which thinking is possible within our tradition.

Consider the relationship between the ancient world and the Christian intellectual tradition. Thinkers like Plato and Aristotle laid the philosophical groundwork by posing enduring questions about truth, being, justice, and the nature of reality. These ideas did not vanish with antiquity. They were taken up, refined, and in many ways transformed by figures such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, who brought Greek philosophical insight into conversation with Christian revelation.

This synthesis, in turn, shaped the thinking of later, more modern figures such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, whose ideas continue to inform our understanding of political life, rights, law, and the structure of modern society.

What we call “great books,” then, are not isolated achievements. They are part of a living conversation, with each one responding to what came before and shaping what comes after. Their greatness lies not only in their internal brilliance, but in their indispensability to that ongoing dialogue.

It is often said that a Great Book does not tell us what to think, but how to think. But even this does not go far enough. Their influence operates at a deeper level still. They form the habits of mind, the categories, the assumptions through which we encounter the world.

If one could somehow remove these works from history, it is not merely that we would lose certain ideas; we would lose the very framework that allows those ideas to be conceived in the first place. Our intellectual “muscle memory”; the patterns by which we reason, question, and understand, would be fundamentally altered.

In this sense, their influence is almost invisible. Like the body’s most vital, automatic functions; the lungs breathing, the heart pumping blood, or the eyes blinking; they operate beneath the level of conscious awareness. We do not notice them precisely because they are so fundamental. It is only through encountering and studying these works directly that we begin to recognize the depth of their influence.

A “great book,” then, is not simply one that endures. It is one that forms. It shapes a civilization not from the outside, but from within. It does not merely survive history; it makes history what it is.

In a word, no.

Classical education is not the exclusive possession of the Catholic Church, nor is it confined to any single denomination or institution. There are many excellent classical schools founded and sustained by our Protestant brothers and sisters in Christ, and there are even secular institutions, such as the Great Hearts network of charter schools, that have embraced the classical model with seriousness and success. Likewise, not every school that bears the name “Catholic” offers a classical education. The two are not synonymous.

And yet, it would be difficult to tell the story of classical education without giving a central place to the Catholic tradition. Why this is so is rather obvious; the classical tradition is, after all, the western tradition, and for centuries, there was simply nobody else around in the West to do the job! 

For much of Western history, the Catholic Church served as the primary steward of learning. The preservation of texts, the cultivation of philosophy and theology, and the transmission of what we now call the “Great Books” all took place, to a remarkable degree, within Catholic institutions. Monasteries, cathedral schools, and later universities did not merely safeguard this inheritance; they developed it, refined it, and handed it on.

This helps explain why classical education is so often found, even today, within Catholic communities. It is not because the method itself is exclusively Catholic, but because it is deeply at home within the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition. 

One might draw a loose parallel to Montessori education: now widely practiced in secular settings, yet originally born from Thomistic Philosophy and nurtured and evolved within Catholic environments; a fact which very few people are aware of today.

There are also broader historical currents worth noting. The rise of modern, industrialized education coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which brought with it new social and economic demands. The world became more mercantile and less religious. Education, in many places, began to shift toward efficiency, standardization, and the formation of a workforce suited to industrial society. Some sociologists, notably Max Weber, have associated aspects of this development with Protestant cultural currents, particularly those emphasizing productivity and economic vocation. Without passing judgment, it is fair to observe that this shift often moved education away from its older, more contemplative and integrative aims.

By contrast, the classical tradition remained oriented toward the formation of the whole person; mind, body, and soul, and toward the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty as ends in themselves. These aims are not uniquely Catholic, but they are profoundly consonant with Catholic theology, which understands education as part of the larger task of forming the human person for both natural flourishing and supernatural destiny.

So while classical education is not exclusively Catholic, it is no accident that it has been so carefully preserved, and is now so vigorously renewed, within Catholic communities. The two are not identical but they are historically and philosophically deeply aligned.