Stories are a Bootcamp for Life | Wes Callihan (Old Western Culture)

In this excerpt from The Philosophers, unit 4 of The Greeks (Old Western Culture series on the Great Books of Western Civilization), Wes Callihan talks about how imaginative literature is like bootcamp for life. Children get to practice the emotions of life, such as pity, terror, pain, guilt, love, redemption, heroism, glory, honor, shame, etc. in stories. In literature we don’t have the demands for action on us the way we do in real life, giving us the opportunity to meditate on those emotions, and what is right and wrong, from a distance.