The latest Education Recovery Scorecard from researchers at Harvard and Stanford should have been a societal gut check. Researchers found that America’s children remain significantly behind where they were before the pandemic, particularly in reading, and despite billions of dollars spent trying to reverse the losses, the recovery has largely stalled.
The cultural expectation that children will regularly read complete books (with words, not graphic novels) has evaporated. Today’s children read in fragments: excerpts assigned at school, passages selected for testing, text messages, social media posts, and video captions.
A book requires patience, sustained attention, and a willingness to follow an argument or narrative for hundreds of pages before arriving at a conclusion. Those are not merely academic skills. They are habits of mind that shape how your brain works.
There is another loss that is perhaps more significant. Books once provided a shared cultural inheritance that connected people across geography, class, and generations. Streaming has fractured U.S. media; there is no longer a modern equivalent to Johnny Carson, who attracted tens of millions of viewers from every corner of American life. Books underwent a similar transformation. Once, there was a common body of stories that educated people could be expected to know. Whether they lived in Boston or Birmingham, children encountered the Greek myths, Shakespeare, Homer, fairy tales, Biblical narratives, and classic adventure stories. That common inheritance provided a shared language through which people understood courage, ambition, sacrifice, tragedy, redemption, and heroism.
Today, that body of books and stories has become far less widely shared, leaving children with fewer common stories, references, and touchstones than perhaps any previous generation of the public.
That reality is part of what makes the launch of Chapter House feel so timely. Chapter House is a new publishing imprint founded by Josh and Hannah Centers, a Charlotte Mason homeschooling family in rural Tennessee whose own educational journey led them to ask a question that is now, unfortunately, radical: What if children were given great books and expected to read them?
The Centers are not strangers to education; Hannah had a 13-year stint teaching Spanish and history in public schools before leaving the classroom to educate the couple’s three children. Josh spent more than a decade working in publishing and editorial. Together, they shared a dream of gathering the living books that shaped their educational philosophy into beautiful, durable editions that would feel as aspirational to children as the stories they contained.
Chapter House publishes restored editions of classic children’s books, organized into four boxed collections — “Heroes and Wonders,” “Warriors and Giants,” “The Triumph of the West,” and “The Odyssey of Europe” — and curates additional grade-by-grade recommendations that help families build an entire reading curriculum around great books. The goal is not merely to sell books; it is to help families recover a reading culture that has become endangered.
The first thing you notice about the collections is that they actually look like books. So much of modern children’s publishing is now designed around disposability; too many books are softcovers with thin bindings that seem all but designed to split after a few readings. By contrast, the Chapter House volumes are a throwback to how publishers once printed their wares: bound in sturdy hardcovers and housed in handsome box sets. These are books intended to be read by multiple siblings, revisited at different ages, and handed down.
That physical beauty conveys the book’s importance before a child ever begins reading and suggests that what lies inside deserves attention and care.
Yet the books themselves are only part of the story. Each volume includes essays and pamphlets explaining how parents can use the books, whether or not they homeschool. There are discussions of educational philosophy, practical guidance for family reading, and thoughtful essays exploring the themes that unite each collection. In many ways, these essays reveal the deeper purpose behind the entire project.
One of the most striking aspects of the accompanying materials is their clarity about the true purpose of education. Modern discussions about education often revolve around measurable outcomes: test scores, college admissions, workforce readiness, and economic competitiveness. Those concerns matter, but they are not the goal of education. Chapter House consistently returns to an older understanding of learning, one that sees education not merely as the acquisition of information but as the formation of values and character.
“Today, we take a scientific approach to knowledge and education,” one essay explains, “but reciting dry facts does little to inspire young minds or hold their attention.”
Throughout most of human history, stories served as humanity’s primary vehicle for transmitting values and wisdom. Stories existed because human beings understood that narrative reaches parts of the soul that facts alone cannot reach. That conviction is the theme of the collections. Discussing Beowulf, the editors quote C.S. Lewis’s famous observation: “Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”
The insight resonates because it speaks to something timeless. Children will encounter disappointment, fear, temptation, failure, grief, and hardship. Stories provide a framework for understanding those experiences when they arrive. They allow children to encounter courage before courage is demanded of them, and sacrifice before sacrifice becomes necessary.
Reading through the collections, I found myself thinking about how often modern educational debates miss this entirely. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing workforce development, STEM achievement, and college preparation, but comparatively little time asking what kinds of people we hope children will become.
The later volumes, devoted to Homer, Shakespeare, and the foundations of Western civilization, make perhaps the strongest case for the project as a whole. The editors describe Homer as foundational to the Western canon in much the same way the Bible serves as its cornerstone. Whether one approaches The Iliad and The Odyssey as history, literature, mythology, or cultural inheritance, it is difficult to overstate their influence. The Trojan Horse. Achilles’ heel. The face that launched a thousand ships. These stories continue to shape our language thousands of years after they were first told because they continue to speak to permanent truths about human nature.
The same is true of Shakespeare. Modern students often encounter Shakespeare as an academic obstacle, but Chapter House approaches him as a cultural inheritance. The pamphlet notes that common phrases such as “too much of a good thing” and “it’s Greek to me” originated in Shakespeare’s plays. We speak Shakespearean English every day without realizing it. To read Shakespeare is not merely to encounter great literature; it is to discover the roots of the language we already use.
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Every culture decides which stories are worth preserving, and the current one has cast aside the classics for what is essentially literary junk food. Whereas in previous generations, children were reading Lewis’s Narnia books and The Phantom Tollbooth, today’s young people are reading Dog Man and Captain Underpants.
The Centers are making a wager that children still hunger for great stories, that parents still want something more substantial than another screen or silly graphic novels. In an age defined by educational decline, cultural fragmentation, shrinking attention spans, and a growing inability to read sustained works of literature, that conviction is refreshingly ambitious. If we want children who understand courage, sacrifice, resilience, beauty, and truth, we will eventually have to introduce them to the stories that taught those virtues to generations before them. And if we want a culture held together by something more substantial than trending topics and algorithmic feeds, we will need common stories once again.
Every civilization is, in some sense, the sum of the stories it tells about itself. Chapter House is betting that those stories are still worth passing on. That seems not only like a worthwhile publishing project, but increasingly like a cultural necessity.
Bethany Mandel is a homeschooling mother of six and co-host of The Mom Wars podcast.