As parents and teachers of boys, we are always searching for writers and voices that have something meaningful to say about our work, about how we can respond thoughtfully to the challenges and opportunities boys face in today’s world. 

Parents often share with me their sense that men and boys are struggling to find a sense of place and purpose in a world profoundly transformed, a world they often feel is indifferent to their questions and concerns.

There is no shortage of men online offering to help young men find their way, though many of the voices that have risen to speak to young men at this moment are not always the ones we hope our boys will emulate. 

I’d like to tell you about a man who has stepped into this space in new and powerful ways that gives me hope for our boys and their future. 

He is a gifted teacher who has held academic positions at Princeton, the University of Virginia, Bowdoin, and Southern Methodist University. He is also the president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

I first heard his voice in a podcast he recently created called Old School.

Each podcast begins: “I’m Shilo Brooks. I’m a professor and CEO. And I believe reading good books makes us stronger, better men.” 

The beautiful message of his work is that if a man is struggling with purpose and meaning, with questions and frustrations, with doubts and anxieties, he should ... read. 

In an essay that accompanied the launch of the podcast, Brooks explained that “a great book induces self-examination and spiritual expansion. When a man is starved for love, work, purpose, money, or vitality, a book wrestling with these themes can be metabolized as energy for the heart.”

Over the course of the podcast’s episodes, Brooks interviews a collection of individuals from various fields, asking them about a book that played an especially important role in their life and formation:

As I listened to Brooks interview these guests, I was struck by his voice. Born into a blue-collar family in West Texas, he speaks not in the accent of an Ivy League academic but in a different register. And his unlikely path from his humble origins is part of what gives his story and his message so much power. 

His biological father, an alcoholic, divorced his mom when Brooks was an infant. His second father stole his mother’s savings, leaving them with nothing but a broken-down car. 

But two men came into his life who changed him forever. 

One was his third father. After serving in the Navy, he became a forklift operator at a local manufacturing plant, doing hard manual labor. As Brooks describes him, he “threw a football like a bullet while wearing steel toe boots, faded Levis, and a trucker hat.” He cooked “over a fire built from wood he split with an axe …” 

“He also loved books.”

After the end of a long day at work, he would come home and spend time with his stepson. They would throw the football. Talk about the outdoors. And then, after dinner, he would read. Novels. Short stories. Poems. National Geographic. And he would share his love of books with his stepson. He was especially fond of novels by Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway—and books about the history of aviation, the American West, and the natural world. And he loved music, helping his stepson see it as a creative act, as a form of poetry, that could speak to the deepest yearnings of a person’s heart.

As Brooks would explain: “My stepfather didn’t so much talk to me about books as show me how to have a relationship with them ... He showed me that living the life of a responsible man means living the life of the mind.” 

“To see a man who drove a forklift by day, who changed his own oil ... and then who talked about literature—this really sat on my heart ... Up to that point in my life, I did not think reading was something men did. To see a man like him take out a novel [changed my sense of what reading and masculinity were about] and gave me an ideal I have tried to respect.”

Reflecting on his stepfather’s influence, Brooks recalls: “His example presented a choice: I could succumb to the temptations of my first two fathers, or I could follow his quiet example, and shape my future by seeking wisdom in the pages of the past.”

This experience with his stepfather, who opened his heart to the power of reading and the role it could play in a person’s life, led him to discover that there was a great American tradition of confident, complex men who were also men of letters: Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy, and countless others. 

And all of this led to another pivotal relationship in Brooks’ life. A local doctor saw in Brooks possibilities he could not see in himself and made a deal with him, offering to send him to college as long as he promised to use his education to make a difference in the lives of others.

Out of this came Brooks’s mission, pursued through his teaching and his podcast, to change the way young people relate to books, to reconnect them to the redemptive power of reading, to help them find the peace and purpose and inspiration that he found in books when he was a young person contending with struggles and trying to find his way in the world. 

He came to believe that reading—or more specifically, recovering a lost way of reading—has the capacity to form us and transform us, providing sources of meaning and purpose in a world desperately in need of these virtues.

“Books invite us to feel unfamiliar feelings and to think new thoughts ... They train us in empathy and make us feel less lonely. They help us to discover what we believe, what we value, and what we never imagined ... And it’s not just the books we enjoy that make us better. Those that require effort to understand because they are difficult, or whose arguments or ideas rub us the wrong way, are perhaps even more edifying. Overcoming intellectual hardship strengthens the mind as much as overcoming physical hardship strengthens the body.”

When he began teaching at selective universities, however, he found something interesting and a bit surprising. These were the brightest and hardest working students anywhere in the world. But something was missing. The students knew how to read large amounts of assigned work, but very little of it reached into their souls. They had been trained from a young age to cover vast amounts of material and then dissect it, to “strip it for spare parts” as Brooks would say, to respond to questions on standardized tests or other markers of external achievement.

What they had not yet learned to do, in Brooks’s words, was “to let books sit with them, to slow down, to read not for a goal external to themselves, like getting a better grade, but because reading is a good in itself, because it makes one wise, because books can shape the arc of your life.”

Brooks wanted his students to recover the lost art, original to the humanities, of viewing a book as a window into the deepest questions of our humanity.

Brooks would say to his Princeton students: “I would rather you learn to read a few books well than many books poorly,” and that you have a few books truly “inscribed on your heart” that will sustain you for the rest of your life.

At first, only around forty students enrolled in his Princeton course on the Art of Statesmanship and Political Life, a journey through the writings of five vastly different but transformative figures: Xenophon, Machiavelli, Theodore Roosevelt, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Frederick Douglass. By year two, more than 250 students enrolled, with Brooks ultimately receiving Princeton’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching award. The course had broken through and was speaking to something profound in the hearts of students. 

At the end of the semester, students would come up to Brooks and say: Thank you. Until this class, I don’t think I had ever truly read a book before. What they meant was that they gradually learned how to “feel the fullness of what a book can do and be in the world.” 

Brooks would say to them: “I want to be sure that your spirit survives the pressures being put upon it and that you remain a unique individual.”

He would remind his students that they were young and needed to expose themselves to ideas that were not their own. “You need to read people whose ideas have endured because they stand for something. You may agree with them, you may disagree with them. Take them into yourself, fight with them, argue with them ... expose yourself to the best that has been thought and said.” 

Brooks’s classes are filled with both men and women with widely varying interests and backgrounds, but his work seems to have a special resonance with men. Through years of teaching, he has found—as we have at St. Albans—that young men yearn to live full lives of meaning and purpose and significance, to feel connected to great causes and ideals, to make a difference in the world.

Rather than looking to false prophets online, Brooks says to young men: Pick up a book. “Take and read,” in the famous words of Augustine. Open your heart and mind to what a book can do and be in the world. Think. Struggle. Question. Doubt. Find within great works of history and literature and philosophy examples of human excellence that can form us and transform us, leading us towards a life of purpose, meaning, and significance.

I have spoken often of the role that teachers and books played in my own life. I grew up in a small town in Virginia. My parents made sacrifices to send me to an independent school in sixth grade, which forever changed my life. 

I had the blessing recently to reconnect with two teachers who had an especially profound impact on me: my sixth-grade history teacher and my high school English teacher. 

Seeing them transported me back to early moments when books and ideas—and the teachers who were my guides and mentors—changed my life forever. They were there for me at pivotal moments, when their love and care made all the difference. 

How does a book and a teacher make this kind of difference? 

Sometimes a book gets into our heart by giving us a model of human excellence and heroism we then aspire to take into our own lives—just as the figure of Socrates in Plato’s Republic did for me. 

Sometimes a book works on us through the power and beauty of its language. Think of Marilynne Robinson’s novels like Gilead, with prose so luminous it almost seems to glow on the page. Or the experience of reading Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school and feeling that I had never encountered an author who could put words together in this way—the beautiful lyricism and artistry of the language, which made me appreciate the power of words in ways I never had before. 

Sometimes books find us when we are most in need, most confused. 

Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is discussed on one of Brooks’s podcasts, begins with the line: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark.” 

In Dante’s case, the dark forest was the experience of being exiled from Florence, his home and the city he most loved, struggling with the despair of loss, of separation, of exile.

Dante’s work is eternal because all of us, at some point in our life, wrestle with that feeling—of being on the journey of life and suddenly finding ourselves lost, confused, separated from the things that give our life meaning. 

We then face the arduous task of climbing out of the dark forest. 

Dante’s Divine Comedy is about many things; but one of its most important teachings is about the need for teachers and guides–that you cannot lift out of the dark on your own (as Joseph Luzzi suggests in the podcast). This is why grace figures so prominently in the book. For Dante, it is the grace ultimately of God but also the smaller graces of the human guides God sends us along the way.

There’s a beautiful scene in Book 7 of Plato’s Republic that shows how this works, that for me remains the greatest thing ever written about our work as teachers and parents. It’s embedded in the famous Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners have been trapped in a cave since childhood, looking at shadows on a wall, a parade of false images, that they take to be real because they have never known anything else. What saves them is a guide, a teacher. And what the teacher does is described as a “turning” of the gazes of the prisoners in a new direction. There is more in heaven and on earth than these shadows on the wall. There is a deeper reality—a truer reality—another way of being. And the teacher, in an act of grace, gets us looking for the first time in a new direction, helping us to see a new possibility and to begin making it our own.

In my life, those graces came in the form of so many teachers who believed in me when I doubted myself, who lifted me up, who taught me to read, to think, to question, to wonder—whose life and example taught me a different way of being in the world. Even when my life seemed a muddle and I did not understand where I fit and what was going on around me, my teachers helped me find my way into another conversation—the great conversation among great books and ideas and thinkers across time—that did make sense to me, that I did feel a part of it, something I could never be separated from.

Paul in the Book of Romans writes that “nothing can separate us from the love of God.” My teachers showed me that nothing can ever separate us from how God’s love expresses itself through the love of teachers, the love of learning, and the special communion among those who have given us the gift of their knowledge and their wisdom, taking us up into the eternal human quest to figure out who we are, what we believe, what it all means—and how to make our way through this tangled, beautiful, mysterious landscape of life. 

It’s hard to think of a school more perfectly matched to this message than St. Albans, where the life of the mind, the world of ideas, and the joys of reading are things we hold with a special reverence—not as ladders of achievement but as windows on the world and mirrors of our humanity. What a gift it is to be part of a school where this is what we teach our students about the substance of a meaningful life. 

Thank you for the privilege of working with your sons.