‘A book is a mirror,” an 18th-century aphorist wrote. “If an ass looks into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” Quote this line with approval to college students now and you’ll court cancellation. Yet the arrow hits the mark cleanly. Much of formal education over the past 50 years or so, especially in the humanities, has become a delusive exercise in mass evasion of this discomfiting truth. At one time the purpose of education was to enhance and even transform the essence of the human being peering back at us in the mirror; now its purpose is to show us the “awesome” selves we have all become pretty much without effort.

The faith invested in education has always overshot its capacity to deliver, which is one reason schools disappoint no matter how well some perform. Students emerge with a few skills if they’re lucky, but the hoped-for trans­formations of mind and spirit, the ones celebrated in commencement addresses, are relatively rare. Still, that faith gets renewed every year as we try to show each legion of neophytes how books can improve their lives.

But can reading be stunted by the often desiccating nature of the academic enterprise itself? Depends on who’s doing the teaching. The ablest instructors must constantly remind their students that works assigned in humanities courses — poems, plays, short stories, novels — were not produced for classroom dissection. They were composed to entertain and enlighten. Emily Dickinson did not write poetry to make grist for term papers. Willa Cather refused permission to one publisher to release a school edition of one of her novels because she didn’t wish to see her work imposed on the recalcitrant: Her novels should be experienced by the imagination, she thought, not provide fodder for exams. And yet if their works were to be removed from classrooms, would we not risk consigning them to oblivion? Such is the fragile thread on which culture can hang.

With this brief expedition into serious reading and thinking, Alan Jacobs, a professor of humanities at Baylor, takes us into his seminars to impart “much of what I have learned over the years by taking my students’ questions and bore­dom seriously,” and he does so without recourse to grating jargon. This is a work of advocacy. “To read old books,” he writes, “is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing” — a sparkling truism certainly, but one that might eventually undercut the entire college imperative if enough folks realize that they can do the reading on their own without professorial midwifery. Nonetheless, Jacobs reminds us just how humane a university classroom can still be in an uneasy and politically charged time when the teacher has been humbly and thoroughly formed by the best — and sometimes most provocative — that’s been thought and said and wishes to open treasures of the past for the young.

To wrestle with old books, to channel old voices and attend to what they have to teach, is truly to “break bread with the dead,” as Auden put it trenchantly, and Jacobs assures us that all are invited to the feast.

This is not a facile treatise rolling out academic abstractions. Had this book been written 25 years ago, Jacobs would likely have depicted somewhat differently the challenges to the task of becoming reasonably educated citizens. As it is, his observations spring from the social order we grapple with now — one marked in and outside the academy by a haughty, militant dismissal of the past and the lessons it can bestow on those who labor to mine and apply them. In a way, Jacobs views our relation (or nonrelation) to the past itself as an index to our capacity for thinking and acting aright.

We have produced two or three generations disturbingly lacking in historical understanding, not to mention appreciation for the benefits of a civilization they can blithely take for granted. Is it possible to be an educated human being without a modicum of intellectual and imaginative engagement with what came before us? The dilemma is especially pressing now, though, because the task of reclamation often doesn’t begin until young people have emerged from high school with practically no knowledge of their world but with, for many, an immensely generous estimate of their own knowing­ness. Jacobs understands the world today’s students inhabit. Apart from the emo­tional burdens typical of their age, they are assailed on all sides by addictively insidious forms of distraction and manipu­lation, electronic information overload, the cumulatively debilitating effects of thin reading, and an incapacity or disinclination to think rationally, a dire state of affairs darkened even further for some by unearned cynicism and a liberally administered dose of ideological self-righteousness.

The obstacles to acquiring a cultivated mind in an age of upheaval may seem insurmountable, but Jacobs tries to cut a path through them.

The journey begins, significantly, with learning to read again. Not merely to read closely and well, as the precocious and gifted test-takers do. They have their reward. We must also learn to bring large measures of humility and imaginative sympathy into our wrestling with the past and what it serves up — the good, the evil, and everything in between — and to do so in the wake of decades of more or less systematic trashing of our country and civilization in schools and the media. This faculty, though, must be painstakingly acquired, and acquiring it requires some­thing akin to Ignatian spiritual exercises for the mind.

And the path to tranquility involves our taking on what Jacobs dubs “personal density” — a term from Thomas Pynchon, though one Jacobs mobilizes well — which means, in short, becoming more substantial selves by synchronizing our intellectual nature with the emotional: to become people inclined to take second and third thoughts, embrace complexity, delve into context, admit manifold ignorance, and accept correction where we have asserted ourselves a bit too brashly. In other words, to become more intelligently humble in the face of a world that pays higher dividends to the cocksure and loudly uncompromising. And the quality of reading that this disposition requires is the slow, reflective burn that lights into contemplation. Anybody who has ever met someone marked by these traits can readily see how such a person is more “dense” — more substantial — than one who isn’t.

This path also involves, in one sense, giving the benefit of the doubt to the past, or at least learning about a period and its people judiciously before passing moral judgment. Jacobs is not uncritical of the people of the past (some of whom are exposed to his magnifying glass) and he doesn’t shy from judgments, but he does believe that those judgments are lent firmer founda­tion when advanced intelli­gently while recognizing the easily over­looked fact that we too inhabit a place along the timeline of history and that our de­scendants may not come to share our high opinion of ourselves. The danger of refusing to cultivate a history-tinted mind is that we come to live “thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know,” which is precisely our public predicament. If fortunate, after much reading and reflecting, we land with the virtue of humility, without which intelligence is simply a loaded gun in reckless hands.

Jacobs quotes from the Epistles of the Roman poet Horace to the effect that, in order to lead a prudent life, leges et percontabere doctos: “You must [read and] interrogate the writings of the wise” (in David Ferry’s nifty trans­lation). Interrogate, yes. Examine thoroughly, certainly. But read first, and sympa­thetically, with the quiet aim of know­ing before judging. Thus can we achieve the kind of mental “tran­quility” Jacobs envisions. It’s a call to intellectual decorum.

The benefits accrued for a vigorous mind may seem less than practical, but they can reach into small corners of life. “To open yourself to the past,” Jacobs writes, “is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending in tweeted wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tweet you didn’t take time to understand, or responding to climate change either by ignoring it or by indulging in impotent rage. You realize that you need not obey the impulses of the moment — which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.”

This slant on the life of the mind may not seem like common fare for the college classroom, but if we are to sustain the integrity of that life, this propaedeutic approach to serious read­ing must return to show us how it’s done. The last few months have demon­strated in the streets that unless we resolve to come to terms with the past, to learn what to cherish and what to reject, and to do so calmly and generously, we will wake one day from the nightmare of “wokeness” to find no culture left to pass on.