Plato’s Refugees: A Visit to St. John’s College
St. John’s College instituted its Great Books program in 1937, and though the list of books has varied from year to year, the commitment to reading the best of mankind’s thought has not. Though a select number of other colleges also offer a Great Books program, St. John’s—which opened a second campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1964—still stands out among its peers. As the college’s president, Christopher Nelson, told me, St. John’s remains unique among Great Books schools for several reasons: (1) The books are read without mediation, the faculty giving minimal background information about the works under discussion; (2) the faculty teach across the curriculum; there are no departments or specialties; (3) all books are approached with a view toward the fundamental question of life: What does it mean to be human? (4) there is no body of knowledge to be mastered, no right or wrong, no answers. At its heart, the college advocates, as Nelson puts its, “the art of acquiring worldly wisdom.”
In the age of educational utilitarianism, when the goal of education “experts” is to have colleges “prepare students for careers in a globally competitive environment,” St. John’s refuses to alter its approach. Nelson counters the charge that the school is producing only philosophers incapable of earning good incomes by reading off a list of the impressive careers onto which “Johnnies” (the term for St. John’s graduates) have successfully embarked: as diplomats, scientists, inventors, journalists, businessmen, attorneys. How is such career success possible for those whose training consists of exploring such seemingly impractical works as seventeenth-century French poet Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables? Nelson believes that by stoking the imagination of students, St. John’s program of liberal learning develops in Johnnies the very quality that is at the heart of entrepreneurship. In addition, students learn to converse with other human beings, to discuss ideas, to think their way through things. All these skills have “practical” uses in the “real world.” Peter Kalkavage, who has taught at the college since 1977, says that St. John’s students are prepared for careers, and for life, by learning how to converse with people and by “attaining intellectual strength in working through difficult subjects.”
Students who come to St. John’s, Mr. Nelson observes, already possess certain traits: They love reading; they are sick of lectures and tests; and they do not want their instructors to provide them with superficial answers to questions which they are expected to repeat back on exams. Mr. Nelson was once such a young person himself. His father was a Johnnie and passed onto his son a love of books. “But I did not appreciate what an extraordinary place this was until I came back as president.”
Standard grades are given at St. John’s, but they are not given out to students or parents as a matter of routine (parents and students must request to see grades). Johnnies, atypically in the modern world of standards and assessment, are not preoccupied with periodic letter grades but are more concerned as to how faculty view the quality of their intellects and of their ability to grapple with assigned texts. Students are not tested in the usual ways. There are no scheduled written exams, and though quizzes exist in certain classes, such as language and science, the primary method of evaluation is done on an ongoing basis as faculty observe the quality of student participation in discussion. The key formal part of this evaluation process is the “don rag,” a session in which the undergraduate students sit individually in a room while listening to the faculty discuss their performance in classes.
Conspicuously absent from the seminar are notebooks. No student is taking notes at the seminar that I attend—certainly not on iPads or laptops—but not even in old-fashioned paper notebooks. Instead, they are listening, and nearly all are contributing to the discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus. The seminar is co-led by “tutors” Eva Brann and Karin Ekholm. Tutor is the the St. John’s term for faculty members, the root of the word indicating that the job of faculty is to watch and guide, not to preach. As Mr. Nelson puts it, the tutors are responsible to their students as much, or even more, than they are responsible to the college administration.
Ms. Brann, a senior contributor to The Imaginative Conservative, has taught at St. John’s for more than fifty-seven years. She began her professional career as an archaeologist but was frustrated by what she perceived as that profession’s hostility to the asking of philosophical questions. In examining pottery at a dig, for example, Ms. Brann wanted to ask not only how the craft of pottery had changed over time but why it had changed. Such questions were seen as bizarre and unprofessional by her archaeological peers. It was these very questions that she wished to consider. Ms. Brann thus found her way to St. John’s in 1957, and though she says the work is very hard, her teaching experience “has never been boring.” She enjoys the freedom from the scholarly pressures that exist at most typical institutions of higher learning. Unlike nearly every other college in the United States, for example, St. John’s does not require its faculty to publish. Tutors are able to write for the sheer joy of writing, though Ms. Brann jokes that if “you do too much writing people become suspicious.”
Ms. Ekholm is a Johnnie, having graduated from St. John’s in 2000. After teaching elementary school in Austin, Texas, and university at Cambridge University, she returned to Annapolis in January 2014 as a tutor. Comparing her experiences as a student and tutor, Ms. Ekholm muses, “we are all students; the tutors just have more experience in learning.” St. John’s, she admits, can be a formidable place, in that all are challenged to their intellectual limits in studying diverse texts and in attempting, say, to translate Greek for the class when that language is not one’s expertise. The attraction of St. John’s to Ms. Ekholm is that the program asks “timeless questions” within a true “intellectual community” in which students and tutors care about each other and each other’s ideas. Indeed, Ms. Ekholm believes that tutors earn the respect of students not by pretending to have all the answers—an idea anathema to the St. John’s premise—but by truly listening to their students. Ms. Ekholm marvels at how her colleague, Ms. Brann, will say to a student after he or she has made an observation on a text that Ms. Brann has read many times, “I have never thought of that.”
Mr. Kalkavage suggests that the tutor must avoid the “tendency to lecture, to move the conversation in a direction where you already are.” Mr. Kalkavage believes that this is more of a challenge for the veteran tutor, who usually knows the texts well. He agrees with Ms. Ekholm that the challenge for the tutor is simply to listen to the students: “We must give them room,” he says, “even to be wrong.” Mr. Kalkavage, who leads the school’s chorus, even tries to temper his enthusiasm for certain texts and pieces of music, lest his exuberance smother his students’ own process of discovery.
“Nowhere else,” Mr. Kalkavage concludes, “cultivates human excellence by allowing for so much human imperfection.” Mr. Nelson suggests that St. John’s best days lie ahead, as St. John’s program of true liberal learning becomes even more unique in a world ever more geared toward “practical education.” In the end, Mr. Kalkavage muses, St. John’s faculty and students are “refugees”: “from the filters of modern and post-modern interpretation, from being told what to think . . . in other words, from academia.”
Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
A member of my family, many of whom are persons of the medical/scientific stock, once concluded a long and generally correct critique of humanities majors by saying “what is the use of philosophers? What are they supposed to be for? Just thinking about things?”
“Ruling,” I told her. And liberal arts educators should not be shy to say it: men and women who pursue liberal learning are most useful at ruling, because no other art can prepare a person for political rule as well as the liberal arts.
It is the most useful and practical art on Earth in a democracy, and quite under-used, sadly.
Once again, Mister Rieth has hit the mark.
While I have never been there, rumors of its excellence impressed me that the English system of a century or so back was similar to the St. John’s programe, in that it was not centered around glorified Vo-Tec training as we have being vigorously promoted today. The graduates of the Oxbridge colleges were well suited to “run” Great Britain and to administer the Empire. When they succumbed to more utilitarian education, they lost the Empire. “Sic transit…” and all that.
I got a lot out of my time there, but it’s got a thoroughly Straussian a nihilistic ethos, and the telos of learning, namely knowing Truth, is shunned as philistine.
The current tuition at St. John’s is $47,176 per year. Given that students could read and discuss the same books for free on their own, how reasonable is this?
I’m not suggesting that a university experience doesn’t, at least in theory, add something; but all proportion has been lost.