How are teachers to begin the school year in such times? Let me suggest three principles for returning to school amidst the pandemic, which can be applied whether schools begin in-person, remotely, or using a hybrid model. These principles will also apply to home-schoolers, who have had to face their own unique challenges during this season.

1. Review your core values.

Amidst a catastrophe, our feeble human plans are the most vulnerable victims. Just as schedules are solidified, teaching assignments are confirmed, and re-opening guidelines are published, they can all come crashing down with a single government news conference. As a result, the mantra across industries has quickly become adaptability and flexibility.

But teachers can’t afford to simply be flexible. Their work is too important. Flexibility is crucial, don’t get me wrong, but flexibility is not a sure foundation anymore than is a trampoline. Core values alone serve as the foundation, whether for a person, classroom, or school. 

Core values are foundational because they don’t change even if circumstances do. A core value is a vital and timeless guiding principle. It serves as a compass or road map along a difficult and precarious journey. In order to persevere through the 2020-21 school year, which is shaping up to be one of the most interesting school years to date, teachers need to review and lead with their core values. 

These values can take different forms, but the key is that they must be general, not specific, and abstract, not concrete. “Love for Learning” can serve as a core value; “Using the school’s LMS effectively” cannot. If you’re not sure what your core values as a teacher are, pull out your journal and do a brainstorm. What are the enduring attributes of your classroom and the way you teach that shouldn’t change regardless of circumstance? Begin with a list of 10-15 ideas. Try to bring your list down to 3-6. Those are your core values. To get you thinking, here are some potential options: “Cultivating Virtue,” “Growth Through Adversity,” “Christlike Service,” or “Teamwork.” 

Once a teacher has honed in on her list of core values, she needs to share these values with her class on Day 1. It will be tempting to begin with a discussion on the current status of the pandemic or perhaps the school’s mask guidelines, but teachers must lead with their core values. These will serve as the engine that moves you through the year, not your desk arrangement.

2. Look to the past to find hope for the present.

One of the greatest fears in times like these stems from the fact that we don’t know the future. How long will the pandemic last? Will the government maintain high-control? Will my students stay focused and driven amidst the distractions around them?

To help our students (and ourselves) persevere through this time, we must remind ourselves of the great stories of the past. This isn’t the first time our world has suffered a pandemic and it likely won’t be the last. When did humanity become so arrogant as to think they are immune to viruses? 

But there is hope. Hope in the God who calms the seas and knows the stars by name, and hope in the ways He has equipped His people to persevere in the past. People have gone through far worse circumstances than we are at present and we should look to them for encouragement and wisdom. Patrick has written on both the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu to cross-reference and provide insight for our own pandemic; I would encourage you to check those articles out. 

Through studying history, we can begin to put together a mental framework for how catastrophes fit into our broader understanding of human history. We can learn how some events, such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, were used by skeptics to question the goodness of God, while others, such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, sent people in droves back to church.

Through looking to the past, we discover nuances and patterns, as well as hope for the future. Applying this principle in your classroom will not only help your students grow as young historians; it will bring them a sense of reassuredness as they view the present situation in a contextualized manner.

3. Cast vision for life after the pandemic.

Believe it or not: this pandemic will end. In some way or another, life will eventually return to normal and this experience will be behind us. Some things will have changed, to be sure, and we ourselves will have changed. But let us remember the wisdom of the Persian poets: “This too shall pass.”

Teachers can cast vision for their students at the beginning of the school year by helping them understand the present pandemic as an episode in a story of which there is hope for a redemptive ending. As Patrick aptly observed in his graduation address, the generation that overcame World War II, earning the moniker “the greatest generation,” is the same demographic cohort that survived the Spanish Flu as high school students. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the catastrophic events they experienced during their late adolescent years prepared them for the greater challenge that awaited them.

Similarly, we can cast a vision for our students that we do not know what the future has in store for them. We do not know how this present crisis is shaping and molding them for some greater challenge ahead. But we do know that God is faithful and He will not abandon them in their time of need. There are good things in store for God’s people.

Another way to cast vision for your students for life after the pandemic is to remind them of their biblically-mandated role here on earth. Christians are to be faithful stewards of the Lord, representing God’s rule and order in creation as they bear the Divine Image. They are to subdue creation, cultivating Christ’s goodness, truth, and beauty within it. Even during these times, our students have a calling, a vocation, to fulfill.

There is a key moment in The Return of the King, the third and final installment of J.R.R. Tolkein’s beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which Gandalf the wizard reflects on his own role as a steward. Gandalf is no political leader, but as an inhabitant of Middle Earth, he feels a moral duty to ensure that the good things left in his care are not neglected. 

Speaking to Lord Denethor, himself a steward, Gandalf declares,

“The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?”

As we return to school this fall, let us remember these words as we teach our students. Schools may open and they may close. There may be moments when the virus surges and when it declines. But as teachers, we must not be distracted by such things. We must remain true to our core values, look for wisdom from the past, and see to it that after the night is over, the worthy things left in our care “can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again.” These worthy things are our students, children of the living God.

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In addition to being educational philosophers, we are also teachers – educational practitioners. What we talk about in our weekly posts we are also trying to live out in the classroom every day. Even though we write from a place of deep thought about educational ideals, sometimes the reality of the daily classroom means we get to workshop how those ideals play out with the students God has given into our care. And believe me, there are days that are less than ideal.

It’s perhaps satisfying for some of our readers to know that sometimes our students struggle to understand why we even have to learn Latin. Sometimes our students don’t wear the correct uniform shirts. Sometimes the lesson we planned that was going to help apply some deep work flow for our students just falls flat. We have to live in grace, knowing that our educational renaissance is carried out by very human beings for very human beings.

This is all preface to the concept I want to play with in this article: school as a place for play. The week before I wrote this in December was final exam week in the upper school. This means there are pockets of time during which students don’t have a class, they don’t have an exam, and the motivation to study for another exam has been depleted. And so they pull out a game to rejuvenate together for a spell. For one such game, the students requested I join them, and my own motivation to grade my exams was just about as low as their motivation to continue studying. Therefore, we played a game together.

Game Play in School

I think it’s very important for games to be played in school. I have played many rounds of four square in my day with my students. My shoulder is permanently sore from epic dodgeball games with middle schoolers. I can’t count the number of dress shoes I’ve gone through playing soccer with the kids. There are any number of card and board games that enrich and enliven the classroom, especially on rainy and cold days. Games teach innumerable lessons, and what is school but an environment for lessons?

The game of choice during exam week was Monopoly Deal. I had never played this before, but apparently it was a favorite of the students. It’s a card-based variation on the Monopoly board game we all grew up on. However, whereas the Monopoly board is rigidly bound by the property squares and has the inevitability of one expected outcome (whoever buys the earliest color group is most likely to win), the card game ebbs and flows as different players create new positions, altering strategic advantages constantly. After one round face up, I figured I had the hang of it. Interestingly, the game itself soon faded into the background of my consciousness as I observed the individuals playing the game. I was fascinated by new insights into the personalities of individual students and the group dynamics that emerged as alliances were made and broken. Who played fair? Who knew the rules best? Who was suspected of peeking at others’ cards? Why gang up on one student when a different student clearly had a stronger position? Something more than game play was going on here.

It just so happened that my humanities class recently focused on the concepts of finite and infinite games, as written about by James Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games. Two voices that raised my awareness of these concepts are leadership guru Simon Sinek and Seth Godin, both of whom have talks that are easily searched on YouTube. In our discussion, we noted how finite games are dependent on some kind of limited resource, and the winner is the one who accumulates the most of that limited resource. It means there are clearly defined winners and losers. There are established boundaries and a clear set of rules that dictate the course of play. Infinite games are far different. They can go on indefinitely because the purpose of the game is not about winning a limited resource, but merely to keep on playing. The rules can change, the boundaries can change, the players can change. We explored how life is comprised of both finite and infinite games, largely embedded within each other.

To explicate this, Monopoly Deal is a finite game. There is a clear ending dictated in the rules. Once a player has completed three property color groups, that player has won. Game over. A limited resource, established boundaries and a clear set of rules make this a finite game. Monopoly Deal, however, is embedded within an infinite game called, “Let’s play together.” Students play together not because there are limited resources, established boundaries and a clear set of rules dictating that students shall play in exactly certain ways, under certain conditions and according to certain norms. Students play games because it is in our human nature to play. There isn’t a winner for the game “Let’s play together.” The game exists in order to continue being played. You might be the winner of Monopoly Deal this time, and I might be the winner of Monopoly Deal next time. But who’s keeping track? That’s not the goal of the infinite game. The goal is just to play together. The dichotomy between the finite and infinite games struck me as I simultaneously played the finite game with my students but observed them on the infinite game level.

Ludus: Is It a School or Is It a Game?

The Latin word ludus is peculiar. It simultaneously means two seemingly different things. The term ludus in one sense means “play, game, or sport.” It’s fun to think about ancient Roman children playing athletic games, like running races, as well as board games. We have artifacts of games that were the forerunners of chess, checkers and backgammon (ludus latrunculi, calculus and tabula). Such artifacts help us to clearly picture what this word ludus means.

The other sense of ludus is “school,” predominantly primary school. The Romans had designated buildings for ludi, with headmasters, desks, writing tablets, etc. The school day started early and ended after children had been exercised in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The Roman world is one we can readily recognize because it contains so many of the trappings of our day. How many students moaned to go to school (ludum) because it meant they couldn’t play games (ludos)? What a peculiar word, then, to describe these two seemingly dichotomous things? Unless, of course, the word itself reveals that “school” and “game” are not after all dichotomous. If school is actually a place to play, and play is a place of learning, maybe the word ludus reveals something we are prone to miss about the reality of education.

Life Is a Game

It shouldn’t surprise us that school is a game. Life, after all, is a game, or at the very least has game-like qualities to it. There are limited resources, boundaries and rules in all kinds of areas of life. Getting into a college, finding a job, and landing a promotion are games we play. Many of the games we play are set up with winners and losers. He got the job, and I didn’t – winner and loser. She got the promotion, and I didn’t – winner and loser. We even make games out of trivial matters. How often have you been in a conversation where the goal is to share a more extreme experience than your friend? Who got less sleep last night? Who had the worst commute? Ironically, we often become the winner by accomplishing better than our opponent a losing strategy.

However, when we apply the concept of the infinite game, we can see that these little finite games are nested within a larger infinite game. Too often we get so caught up in the finite games we play that we lose sight of the infinite game. The infinite game considers such concepts as my long-term happiness, living a meaningful life, and being driven by purposeful relationships and events. The infinite game makes the finite games irrelevant. I might not have gotten that promotion, by my infinite game wasn’t dependent on that promotion. For many, the competition to get the promotion fits into only a narrowly defined finite game. But what if the promotion is not aligned with, or is even contradictory to one’s long-term, infinite game strategy?

Thinking in terms of finite and infinite games has been a rather essential aspect of my college guidance strategy. The approach most students take regarding colleges is to play the finite game. What is the best college with the top-ranked degree program in the field of my choice? Can I boost my GPA and my college entrance exams just a little bit more to not only get into college, but to land the highest merit-based scholarship? Now it is not that these games aren’t worth playing. Those limited resources are out there and some students thrive on the competition that comes with finite games. Yet most students aren’t best served by playing the finite game. There’s an infinite game that can be played instead that flips the college-choice question on its head. It begins by having the student work through their own vision for their lives. What kind of skills, passion, calling or agenda do they sense for their lives? When students start to envision a meaningful and purposeful future, they can start to see that college exists to enable the student to fulfill that vision. You can hear the infinite game being played now. When I play the finite game, the college sets the agenda and the student has to fit the criteria of the college. When I play the infinite game, the student sets the agenda and the college now has to fit the criteria of the student.

Let’s be clear, this means we’re playing a different game than most college-bound students are playing. The finite game player might say that you just lost the game by not going to the highly-selective school or not going for the top scholarship. But the infinite game player can swat that gadfly away by saying she’s playing a completely different game, a long-term strategy that has more to do with crafting a meaningful life rather than getting a notch on the belt. Obviously we aren’t dealing with diametric categories. You can go after the elite college and the top scholarship as part of a long-term strategy. Perhaps that’s part of how an individual plans to shape his or her meaningful and purposeful life. Great! It’s just that most who play the finite game miss the larger picture and blindly pursue a gambit without thinking through the long-term priorities of life.

To Become a Game Master, You Must Master the Rules

I think understanding school as a game can be helpful in many respects. We can see how school is supposed to have a playful aspect to it. There should be a deep and abiding joy as teachers and students make discoveries together. Learning is fun. We don’t need to hype it up by superimposing games on the classroom. Instead, we can see how game play is part of learning.

School rules are often handed down (or at the very least received by students) in a less than joyful way. One way to help students reconsider the rules is to see how all games have rules. The rules establish order and justice. Our post-game discussions of sports more often than not come down to the rules. We complain when a ref misses a call. We cry foul at a perceived bending of the rules, placing our local team at an unfair disadvantage (rarely does this feeling get applied to the opponent’s perceived unfair disadvantage). A school has to have rules as well. Fair, balanced, equitable game play is the result.

As I write my eBook on habit training, it strikes me that schools are playing an essential role in the infinite game of students’ lives. The fundamental goal of habit training is not to create automatons, but to enable the student to live a pleasant and easy life. The more a student gains a sense that they are creating for themselves a meaningful life, the more purpose any and all of the rules of the game take on. Moreover, the teacher is not merely there to enforce the rules. Instead, the rules (or a more worthy concept – the habits) are there to promote life skills.

As we enter a new calendar year, I hope this reflection on school as a game renews your commitment to playing the infinite game with your students.

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Rediscovering a World of Ideas

Prior to the age of exploration, exploding into life after Columbus’s westward journey across the Atlantic in 1492, a different exploration of an unknown world occurred after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For well over a millennium, the Byzantine empire was the eastern stronghold of Christendom, paralleling the Roman church in the west. The Ottomans with superior military technology breached the walls of the famous imperial capital, simultaneously ending the Medieval assumption that Christendom was unassailable. Byzantine scholars seeking to protect the vast stores of manuscripts housed in Constantinople emigrated to Northern Italy, bringing with them Greek texts long forgotten in the west. These texts fueled an already burgeoning intellectual environment in such cities as Venice, Florence and Milan.

A new form of humanism was gaining traction in the north of Italy, reacting to the calamities of the late Middle Ages. The black plague decimated perhaps a third of Europe’s population, exacerbated by poverty and famine. The fracturing of Roman Catholic hegemony through internal warfare, such as the war of the Roses in England or the hundred years war between England and France, brought an end to an economically, politically and religiously unified Europe. Yet a number of institutions carried over from the heights of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, chief among them the universities. Italian universities such as Bologna, Padua, Rome and Turin shared a history with the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. The scholasticism that flourished in the medieval universities instigated a tireless search for classic texts, as scholars sought to reconcile theology and philosophy through dialectical reasoning. Humanism, the study of classical antiquity, offered a new vision by looking to the past. The texts brought to Northern Italy after the fall of Constantinople added fuel, in the form of Greek classical texts, to the fire of the emerging humanism. Works by Aristotle and Plato, long forgotten in the west, arrived in Venice and Florence in the hands of Byzantine scholars. Soon a concerted effort to translate Greek texts into Latin became a project of primary importance. The old universities were a happy home in which the Renaissance humanists could partake in this new project.

Renewing Educational Goals

Renaissance education inherited a ready-made structure developed in the middle ages. The humanist ideal of rebirthing civilization by drawing upon classical antiquity was happily situated within this educational structure. Today, the classical Christian school movement has likewise drawn upon the very same structure. The liberal arts were comprised of the trivium and quadrivium. Let’s see how the trivium met the goals of Renaissance educational goals.

Grammar was the initial art of the trivium. Not only were the parts of speech learned, but students would also theorize about the nature of language and how thoughts were shaped through the use of words. The study of Latin and Greek were essential to the Renaissance enterprise, especially since both ancient languages were not spoken in the West. Young scholars would learn these languages in order to interact directly with the rediscovered manuscripts from the East, written predominantly in Greek. Or students would acquire Latin, the language of scholarly pursuit, so that they could read the newly available translations of Aristotle and Plato.

Students learned how to reason carefully by acquiring skills in logic. The dialectical method drew opposing viewpoints together in order to establish the truth of statements. Aristotle reigned supreme, his theory of syllogism providing powerful tools to thinkers of all eras by carefully defining premises and conclusions by way of deduction. Several of Aristotle’s works were already known during the Middle Ages, but texts from Constantinople were quickly translated into Latin and formed the new logic (logica nova). Professors quickly added numerous commentaries on these Aristotelian texts, which often extended the dialectical method into the realms of philosophy, theology and ethics.

The most revolutionary of the arts in the Renaissance was rhetoric. The scholastic theology of the Middle Ages was mired in dialectic thought that was beholden to rigid dogmas. Even more important than the new logic were the rhetorical texts discovered in the early renaissance: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Brutus’s Orator. The study of rhetoric not only entailed acquiring skill in expression, but also the study of examples of rhetorical skill, what we might call profane literature. Quintilian in particular focused attention on the rhetorical ideal of the good man speaking well. Notions of the good man coincided with the emerging humanism of the time. In the face of the fall of society, rhetoric provided a set of concepts to call individuals to noble civic duty.

If western society was going to survive the fall of the Christendom of the middle ages, a renewal of educational goals was necessary. This renewal set in motion a reconsideration of human beings as self-directed individuals capable of setting the course of society through their own moral agency. In some ways this was a challenge to the church and to God, yet in other ways it refined conceptions of church, God and theology. Martin Luther, for instance, concluded that Aristotle was the foundation upon which the authoritarian doctrine of the Roman church was based. Only through removing Aristotelian concepts of the soul and ethics does one properly encounter the soul and ethics of scripture. However, in challenging these conceptions, Luther challenged the authority of the church, leading to a break with the Roman church and a broader reformation of Christianity throughout Europe. Francis Bacon would likewise challenge Aristotelian notions of deductive reasoning based on syllogisms, formulating a new scientific method around induction. Beginning with facts observed through sense perception, the scientist derives general truths through the observation of nature. Revolutions in society impacted not only theology and science, but economics, politics among other areas of knowledge. A renewal of education breathed new life into a stultified western society.

An Educational Renaissance Today

Society is due for a rebirth today, and perhaps is observing the sparks of one in an educational renaissance that parallels that of Italy and broader Europe in the 15th century. In her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers proposes a return to an old form of education as a mean of accomplishing renewal today. She writes:

“If we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.”

This statement lays out three important ideas. First, the success of a free, democratic society depends upon the quality of education its people receive. Publishing her article in 1947, Sayers would have been all too aware of the dangers of the far-right authoritarianism of Nazi Germany as well as the emerging threat of authoritarian communism in the Soviet Union at the outset of the Cold War. However, the most significant threat to democracy was not fascism or Marxism in foreign lands, but the loss of the liberal arts tradition within our own lands. This leads to Sayers’ second point, that the “wheel of progress” had made certain unfulfilled promises. Progressivist educational theory almost completely took over schools in earnest during the late 1800s, although Sayers is correct that progressive educational thought had been around since Locke and Rousseau. The cultural and moral relativism of the progressive program eroded a sense of truth residing outside the individual. Instead, the internal motivations of the child took on central importance, guided by insights in the fields of psychology and sociology. Education took on more utilitarian aims, forsaking the long-held notion that education imparts the norms and ideals of society. Finally, Sayers’ points to the educational model of the Middle Ages, the liberal arts tradition that was part and parcel of Western civilization, which we have seen was foundational to the educational goals of the Renaissance, during which a renewal of society took place.

The claim has been made that Western civilization has fallen. Rod Dreher for instance traces a centuries-long decline of Western society through key revolutions. In his book The Benedict Option, he considers how we are seeing a cultural decline today that parallels the decline of Roman culture in the 6th century. Dreher looks to the past in how Benedict formed intentional communities to preserve the heart of Christian culture and to weather the fall of Western society. Similarly, we can look to the past to identify educational theories, methods and practices that will enable us to rebuild and renew Western civilization. Yet for several decades now there has been a growing sense that educational reform is needed and in some sectors already occurring. Add this to the growing literature on neuroscience and educational psychology. We find ourselves at the very same intersection Renaissance intellectuals found themselves: the recovery of that which was long-forgotten in a context of burgeoning intellectual pursuit. We are ready for an educational renaissance.

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A notable example of this is told in professor Alan Jacobs’ book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford 2011). Joe O’Shea was president of the student government at Florida State and a Rhodes Scholar. At a lunchtime gathering for leaders to the university he boasted:

I don’t read books per se. I go to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly. Some of this comes from books. But sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good use of my time as I can get all the information I need faster through the web. (As quoted in Jacobs 72)

Professor Jacobs comments that Joe O’Shea was “obviously a very smart guy” and “has an excellent strategy”; however, his viewpoint suffers from thinking of reading simply “as a means of uploading data” (72).

That said, the ability to upload data is often precisely what the educational world wants students to do. This can be indicated by the nature of the tests that are given at the end of a unit. If students have successfully uploaded the relevant information, they will pass these tests, no matter how they did so. Data-mining is the skill of the internet age, and O’Shea is probably right to suggest that the short-from hyper-attention reading of internet pages will likely work just fine for the average student, let alone knowledge worker of the 21^st century.

Near the climax of his book Alan Jacobs makes a stunning claim to differentiate deep reading from schooling:

Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press. (109)

For Jacobs this rather dire pronouncement (at least from the perspective of our educational renaissance) strikes a positive note related to the central purpose of his book, which is to commend the pleasures of reading on one’s own simply at whim for those faithful few who love and prefer reading even in the throes of our distracting age.

While Jacobs may express some genuine nostalgia for the education of a figure like St. Augustine—who “spent countless hours of his education poring over, analyzing word-by-word, and memorizing a handful of books, most of them by Virgil and Cicero” (109)—his ringing endorsement of how the Kindle (irony of ironies) restored deep reading to his own distracted brain, for instance, is emblematic of his love for deep reading with a modern twist. In fact, one of the strengths of Jacob’s book is his moderate viewpoint, neither embracing doom-and-gloom ludditism, nor ignoring the distracting elements of the internet age. (For more on the details of this distraction I highly recommend Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.)

But all of this continues to raise the question, to what extent should the narrow and old-fashioned skill of deep reading be a major goal of education. It doesn’t admit of an easy answer. Like many highly complex skills taught nowadays—higher mathematics comes to mind—it has to be conceded that the vast majority of students will likely never use such skills in their normal working life. A simplistic pragmatism can hardly be the determining factor. Of course, some students must learn calculus, if only for the fact that our society will need some engineers, and students are unlikely to enter upon an educational and career path that they have had little preparation for in earlier stages of education.

Perhaps the same sort of enlightened pragmatism can speak up for deep reading. Unless we try to make as many of our students as possible into deep readers, we are unlikely to get the requisite quantity and quality of deep readers to cause our culture to thrive. The Renaissance is a good example of the cultural flourishing promised by a recovery of the classical tradition of humane and deep reading, as well as of the arts.

While I’m certainly not claiming that this type of pragmatic argument for the importance of deep reading in education is the only or even the best one, it is nevertheless an argument that will likely appeal to our generation. In a way, it parallels the argument of a recent best-seller by Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Grand Central, 2016).

Cal Newport argues that in our increasingly distracted world, the skill of engaging in deep work of one kind or another is becoming more and more rare. Therefore, knowledge workers or other professionals who have the discipline to block out the distractions and focus on the deep work that involves the deliberate practice of their craft will quickly rise above the average knowledge worker in terms of the quality of what they produce. That’s because of his equation:

           High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) × (Intensity of Focus)

He calls this a “law of productivity” and, given the science on what distraction and attention-shifting does to our brain, it’s hard to argue with its basic logic (40). For instance, he cites research by Sophie Leroy on attention residue demonstrating that people perform poorly when interrupted and forced to switch to a new and challenging task (42).

Those who work deeply will therefore produce more and at a higher quality than those who don’t. Because of this, they are likely to be more valuable in their chosen profession, leading to their own personal success as well as benefiting society through their exceptional expertise.

Deep reading is simply one form of deep work. And perhaps it is one that is ideally suited to training students in the capacity for deep work generally. What could be more suited to adapting students to the necessity of blocking out all external stimuli and getting down to work, than the requirement to read a long-form book for extended hours out of their day? Although Joe O’Shea may be able to rig the current system in his favor through his shallow data-mining reading, he is unlikely to demonstrate the type of scholarly depth of insight characteristic of the deep reader. The quality of his understanding and the sheer volume of material comprehended is likely to be dwarfed by the committed deep reader. O’Shea may be able to pass multiple choice tests with flying colors, but what sort of research papers will he write? How creative and original will be his proposals? Will he be able to contribute the hard-won and game-changing conclusions that are most valuable to our world?

In essence, then, my contention is that the discipline of deep reading, precisely because it is so rare and arcane, is likely to give our students in the modern age an incredible leg up, an advantage over other students that can hardly be overstated. For the majority of iGen students, saturated in and addicted to the distractions of the internet, social media and the latest on Netflix, deep reading will remain an undesirable and increasingly impossible discipline to cultivate. The few deep readers among them will inevitably turn into the leaders and the culture-shapers of the next generation, disciplined as they have been to tune out the distractions and focus on practicing a valuable skill to mastery.

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