<p>If a hardcore Liberal Arts education is what you want, go to St. John’s College. First of all, we’re all great books, all the time. If you’re going to submit yourself to this weird, intense kind of education, why do it halfway? Go all out. </p>
<p>To those who want St John’s to update its curriculum or expand it’s authors list, I say this: the best kept secret about the college is that much of the learning goes on outside the classroom, in study groups consisting of both tutors and students. </p>
<p>If you want to read Rand or Orwell or some of the moderns, you’ll find faculty and peers who are willing to invest as much time into a regular study group on it that they would if it were a regular class. I was able to study Shakespeare in a classroom like setting all four years at SJC – and you can study pretty much anything you want, if you’re willing to add it on top of your regular workload, which many are. </p>
<p>If you want to learn Latin or German there are regular unofficial classes on it. I think I’ve seen Russian and Hebrew books as well, and study groups on everything from Xenophon to Classical Liberal Economics to Ken Burns’ History of Jazz. </p>
<p>There really is no upper limit to how much you can learn while you’re there, and the tutors (our professors) are uncommonly willing to devote their time to studying them with you. </p>
<p>Stealing from a 2010 convocation address: </p>
<p>"If the objective of a St. Johns education is freedom, or free men and women, how does St. Johns help its students attain this freedom? The answer is through an all-required curriculum in the liberal arts. The St. Johns curriculum is not as radical perhaps as the program Plato lays out in The Republic, which the freshmen and graduate students in Liberal Arts will study later this year. Yet all the undergraduates study four years of mathematics; four years of language, two of ancient Greek and two of French; three years of laboratory science; two years of music; four years of seminar; and allows for only two electives, what we call preceptorials. These courses are reflected in the senior essays. And a graduate curriculum in both Eastern Classics and Liberal Arts that is similarly structured. A curriculum for graduate students and undergraduates which is based on reading and discussing original texts, many of which were written hundreds, even thousands, of years ago, some in now dead languages. Texts that are sometimes referred to as Great Books.
Why original texts; why Great Books, eastern or western? How do they contribute to making free men and women?
They do so by raising the most fundamental, important and eternal questions. Questions that are as alive today as they were centuries ago. Questions of character and virtue, questions of human relations, questions of power and politics, questions of war and peace, questions of life and death, questions of who we are and where we are going, questions of the divine and more. We grapple with these questions precisely because they provide insights that may guide us today in our personal lives and in our lives as citizens and members of a global society. Questions that are the foundation of freedom.
The St. Johns curriculum may, on the surface, seem not only the antithesis of freedom, but even anti-democratic, as choice is the essence of democracy. However, although the curriculum is determined, the education that emerges from this curriculum is anything but. Choice is abundant in the questions that are raised and the manner in which they are addressed as is evident in the senior essay topics. In fact, we believe that we have the most democratic classrooms possible. Nothing is predetermined. Every question is open for discussion. Everyone is equal in the classroom and has a voice before the texts and the ideas they contain. Classes at St. Johns are led by tutors, not professors. Tutors, who are here because they want to learn with the students, not lecture or profess. The conversation begins with a question from the tutor, but the class responds to the questions of all. The texts themselves are the teachers. Learning is the goal and questions are the means. " </p>
<p>If you’re willing to really let the books get into your soul and teach you and change you, go to St. John’s. We make free men from children by means of books and a balance. There is no substitute.</p>