HUTCHINS & ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
“Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you’ll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There’s no choice in the matter. There’s little choice, period.
Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it’s Kant. You have no major, only “the program,” an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed.
It’s intense. Learning astronomy and math, you don’t merely encounter Copernicus’s conclusions. You pore over his actual words. You’re not simply introduced to the theory of relativity. You read “Relativity,” the book that Albert Einstein wrote.
Diversions are limited. There’s no swimming team. No pool. The dorms are functional; same goes for the dining. You’re not here for banh mi. You’re here for Baudelaire.
I’m talking about St. John’s College, which was founded in 1696 in Annapolis, Md., is the third-oldest college in America and, between its campus there and the one here, has about 775 undergraduates. And I’m drawing attention to it because it’s an increasingly exotic and important holdout against so many developments in higher education — the stress on vocational training, the treatment of students as fickle consumers, the elevation of individualism over a shared heritage — that have gone too far. It’s a necessary tug back in the other direction.”
The above are the opening paragraphs of a Frank Bruni piece, “The Most Contrarian College,” in America in today’s New York Times.
What Bruni may, or may not, know is that St. John’s College is an example of the ideas expressed by, in my mind, America’s greatest educator of the twentieth century, Robert Maynard Hutchins.
When you have some available time it would serve you well to read the Milton Meyer biography of Hutchins’ life and ideas. It will give you a fresh look at the potential of American education.
More on Monday – – –
— Bill Walton, co-Founder, ITC Learning
September 12, 2018
www.itclearning.com/blog/ (Mondays & Wednesdays)
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