<p>Your criticisms are ill-informed. The great books series that is criticized in Beam's book is not what we use in our program. A wide range of great translations are available in our bookstore and utilized in class discussions (many of the respected translations were actually produced by st. john's professors).
The value of the books in the program is not determined by the race or gender of the author. It is determined by the lasting impact that they have had on the arch of western thought. Dwelling upon the race of the authors of these books is both irrelevant and, arguably, racist. Whether you like it or not, it's impossible to fully understand modern philosophy, political science, ontology, cosmology etc. without an in depth examination of plato, aristotle, aquinas, and other ancients who impacted modern thought (it's been said that every philosophical text since plato has been a footnote to plato).
In response to your criticism of the math/science component of the program, you might be able to understand principles expressed in modern textbooks, but if you truly want to understand WHY the principles are true and how they were arrived at, it's useful to examine the manner in which newton, for instance, responds to apollonius, who responds to euclid etc. Modern science and math is just one phase in an ongoing conversation that has been taking place over the centuries. It doesn't begin and end with the latest textbook. At st. john's, we strive to understand the entire conversation, not just the latest response.
Please don't proffer misinformation and opinion as though it's fact.</p>
<p>@Derek</p>
<p>Ah, but correct me if I'm wrong. St. Johns' was founded on the Great Books Curriculum as taught by Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. My facts are correct. Hutchins and Adler just have to be up there in the pantheon of Great Founders at St. John. </p>
<p>Oh...I see St. J's had make some really major modifications to the original Great List (perhaps in shame) dreamed up by the Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler's door-to-door encyclopedia tag team. From reading St. John's reading list here:</p>
<p>St</a>. John’s College | Academic Program | Annapolis Undergraduate Reading List</p>
<p>alas, we can see a few of Booker T. Washington speeches, of course WEB Dubois' The Soul of a Black Man. Taught in the April of the last semester of the last year. Nice fit with Black History Month. Way to go! And, I spot the only woman writer here, too, and going by the first name of George! To me this approaches tokenism. </p>
<p>For super modern, there's such 20th Century greats as Freud, Faulkner, Conrad and James. A curious selection. Again, the Senior year only. I can hear Adler ranting now as he lobbied hard to the Britannica folks to keep anything as modern as 1900 out of the original Great List. Good...I see Twain made the cut at St. John's. So there is hope. </p>
<p>Perhaps you think suggesting some kind cultural/gender/ethnic diversity in an undergraduate reading curriculum is somehow racist. Sir, I respectfully suggest you re examine your unexamined attitudes. </p>
<p>For now, I stand by my suggestion that one carefully examine the St. John's reading curriculum and lab descriptions and read Beam's book describing the founding of St. Johns. Beam actually visited for a few weeks during the school year.</p>
<p>By the way, there is a dark dusty warehouse of almost a million unsold sets of Great Books of the Western World in Chicago somewhere. Britannica doesn't know what to do with them. You can however, buy the new post-Adler edition here:
The</a> Britannica Store</p>
<p>on sale for about $1000.</p>
<p>I still think considerations of race and gender are superficial and, again, irrelevant. Kierkegaard is worth reading because of the influence his ideas have had, not because he's white. To criticize the great books is to criticize the intellectual heritage that we're all beholden to (simply by virtue of being born in the western world). You shouldn't let your politicization of the books inhibit your capacity to see the value of the ideas they represent.</p>
<p>@jyturley:</p>
<p>To read something because a black or a woman wrote something is just as sexist/racist as not reading them for the same reason.</p>
<p>We don't choose our books based on race or gender- we choose them based on the impact that they've had on world thought.</p>
<p>20th century stuff hasn't had as much time to change the world....</p>
<p>Also, the curriculum is chronological. Meaning, it starts with Ancient Greece and moves forwards in time, so I wouldn't expect any 20th century writings to be on there before Senior Year. There's a lot to cover before then.</p>
<p>My biggest complaint is that the curriculum provides a cursory overview at best. Many highly influential authors are noticeably missing. Cicero, Hesiod, Livy, Xenophon, Ovid, Seneca, Horace...good grief, even Pliny's natural history isn't included. That's not even including the more minor authors like Pindar, Sallust, and Petronius. Even the authors covered are not given proper treatment. Aristotle's Athenian Constitution has been enormously influential, but it's nowhere on the list.</p>
<p>It also blatantly ignores other ancient writings. Genesis is covered but not the Enuma Elish? Homer but not the Epic of Gilgamesh? SJC chooses the most influential writings, to be sure, but it's just as important to learn where those writers drew their inspiration.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In response to your criticism of the math/science component of the program, you might be able to understand principles expressed in modern textbooks, but if you truly want to understand WHY the principles are true and how they were arrived at, it's useful to examine the manner in which newton, for instance, responds to apollonius, who responds to euclid etc. Modern science and math is just one phase in an ongoing conversation that has been taking place over the centuries. It doesn't begin and end with the latest textbook. At st. john's, we strive to understand the entire conversation, not just the latest response.
[/quote]
Teaching the phlogiston theory and corpuscular light theory is all well and good, but is it really that useful? All disciplines evolve over time, and it's more than any reasonable curriculum could handle to attempt to cram 4000 years of science into a four year curriculum. At a time when string theory and loop quantum gravity are attempting to unify fundamental physical phenomena, when mDNA is finally revealing important information about human origins, and when radioactive dating has revolutionized paleontology, should teaching Rutherford and Young be a primary focus?</p>
<p>Even if one argues that the original texts are important, once again they do not seem to be covered very well. I find it telling that Steno, who virtually founded geology and paleontology, is not on the reading list, nor is his enormously influential successor Charles Lyell.</p>
<p>No curriculum is perfect, and I am not claiming that we read ALL of the Great Books....
But we do read Great Books</p>
<p>We try to pick the ones which have had the greatest influence...
Genesis, for example, has effected Western Thought far more than the Gilgamesh story....</p>
<p>Sure, we're missing some. But we aren't just reading now, and then stopping after four years, remember. Most alums go on to keep learning about all kinds of things- but still, reading from the sources. </p>
<p>I think there's a lot to be said for learning where the information came from... Basic Chem isn't so different than it was a couple of hundred years ago. Blood still circulates. The angles in a triangle are still two right angles (up until Non-Euclidean geometry, which we also learn). A lot of the stuff is still the same, and learning these great minds reached their conclusions, knowing what they knew, replicating their experiments-- these are building blocks for thinking......</p>
<p>You're free to disagree, of course. My school isn't perfect for everyone.
But it is definitely worthwhile, and it has it's own special place in the collegiate world.</p>
<p>
Now, that I'll agree with. :) It's just ever so frustrating when SJC boosters (most of whom have no connection to the school) boast about the superiority of its curriculum. It's a very good curriculum; I just tend to view it as an alternate rather than better education. In a time when Classics is struggling in its last breaths, I think a SJC education can be a very good thing for the right people.</p>
<p>Agreed. It's just ever so frustrating for me when critics of the program make us out to be a bunch of antiquarian racists.</p>
<p>Derek Duplessie and booklet0519, I think the classy and sophisticated way in which you handled the arguments thrown at you in this thread speaks very well for the education you've received. I came into the thread open-minded and left feeling persuaded by both the content and the manner in which it was presented.</p>
<p>Does SJC offer a distance learning course in how to do that? I get bombarded with ad hominem arguments all the time and usually I just get all knotted up inside and something on that level.</p>
<p>But...getting back to the spirit of the OP: How does it work at SJC in terms of choosing a "major" field of study? If I'm getting this correctly, there are no majors. But what if a student wants to get a PhD in Russian, or English or math?</p>
<p>Bird rock, thanks for the compliment. Technically, every student graduates with a double major in philosophy and history of math and science, and a double minor in comparative literature and classics. Graduate schools (in most fields) are generally very receptive of st. john's graduates because of the breadth and rigor of the program. Every year graduates even go on to phd programs in the hard sciences and medical school. Sometimes requirements are waved, other times students are admitted, but required to take a couple of supplementary courses (organic chemistry, etc).</p>
<p>Albert Einstein believed that historical scientific lectures were "beautiful luxuries". To quote:</p>
<p>"In my opinion there should be no compulsory reading of classical authors in the field of science. I believe also that the laboratory studies should be selected from a purely pedagogical and not historical point of view. On the other side, I am convinced that lectures concerning the historical development of ideas in different fields are of great value for intelligent students, for such studies are furthering very effectively the independence of judgment and independence from blind belief in temporarily accepted views. I believe that such lectures should be treated as a kind of beautiful luxury and the students should not be bothered with examinations concerning historical facts."</p>
<p>Trying to understand how Ptolemy twisted his mathematical models to fit into an earth-centric universe is worth about a 10 minute discussion for those who have the luxury.</p>
<p>Even if it were true that a historical approach to math/science is superfluous for a student of math/science, which I think is false, the goal of the math/science component of the program is critically important to a student of philosophy. Unlike today, in the ancient world there was no great schism between the humanities and math/science. The only distinction made was between moral philosophy and natural philosophy (or perhaps between speculative and practical reason). Plato's Timeus, for example, would be largely unaccessible without any knowledge of Euclid.
Aside from giving us a frame of reference with which to approach strictly philosophical texts (which we read in seminar), the math tutorial and lab component also equips us with the tools needed to more carefully approach the texts. Among other things, being forced to demonstrate euclid propositions greatly enhances one's logical reasoning capabilities. Lab places a great emphasis on careful questioning and close observation, all skills needed to properly read and interpret literature. The tutorials, although important unto themselves, enable us to more proficiently read and understand the texts we approach in seminar (the heart of the program).
It's hard to explain, but the program is truly interdisciplinary. We approach everything philosophically. Just to give one last example involving ptolemy (which according to you is useless), our meetings on ptolemy obviously involved geometrical demonstrations, but frequently the conversation revolved around the theological implications of ptolemy's project. He began his inquiry as a pious attempt to prove the platonic notion that every thing above the lunar sphere is eternal and divine. For this reason, he felt it necessary to prove that all of the apparent chaos in the cosmos is actually caused by circular, uniform motion. His project had the potential not only to advance mathematics, but also to affirm or destroy a society's conception of god. But, hey, why talk about any of that? What other math class could afford the opportunity to discuss methodology, geometry, philosophy, and the problematic relationship between faith and reason that characterizes the western tradition? Maybe what we do isn't legitimate math, but for me, it's far more rich.</p>
<p>lol, I can't tell if IBclass06 is being sarcastic.</p>
<p>Take a look at Columbia's Core, then return to criticize SJC.</p>
<p>Does it still admit 80 percent of applicants?</p>
<p>Yeah, 80% of those who are crazy enough to be interested in the school and to write 10-15 pgs. worth of admissions essays. Then 15% or more will drop out, and 5-10% of those remaining will get disenabled after sophomore year and have to leave (hope I'm not one of them).</p>
<p>@Derek</p>
<p>We'll I think Einstein would have enjoyed the luxury of the Ptolemy class you describe. I would have too, believe it or not. My point (and Einstein's) is doing so probably won't result in important (or any) new achievements in celestial mechanics. </p>
<p>In the interests of full disclosure in relation to this SJC bashing thread, and the intelligent defenses by Derek and booklet, I admit a bias. My grandfather taught math at the US Naval Academy, whom we visited often as a kid :-)</p>
<p>
<p>Take a look at Columbia's Core, then return to criticize SJC.
I'm rarely sarcastic, unless someone posts something exceptionally stupid.</p>
<p>I'm a big fan of Columbia's core and Reed's humanities program.</p>
<p>QUOTES FROM JYTURLEY:
1.Before you jump into St. John's in Annapolis be sure to read this book:
A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books </p>
<p>You will change your mind. At St. John's, we're talking here about the obsession of University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and his comical sidekick Mortimer Adler. If you want to read 50 volumes of unillustrated, poorly translated, white slabbed pages by Dead White Men (there were no Black writers in the first set) taken completely out of historical context, or you want to study Ptolemaic astro mechanics based on an obsolete Earth-centric model (ouch!), or perform obscure Newtonian optical experiments that have no relevance to the modern science, the St. John's is the place for you.</p>
<p>Read Beam. Then make up your mind.
2. Ah, but correct me if I'm wrong. St. Johns' was founded on the Great Books Curriculum as taught by Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. My facts are correct. Hutchins and Adler just have to be up there in the pantheon of Great Founders at St. John.</p>
<p>Oh...I see St. J's had make some really major modifications to the original Great List (perhaps in shame) dreamed up by the Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler's door-to-door encyclopedia tag team</p>
<hr>
<hr>
<p>Well, I wasn't really comfortable replying to this post until I'd read Beam's book.
I have, and it's terrible.
I sincerely hope no one is using that book to understand the college in any way. </p>
<p>As I cannot reply directly to him, I will respond here, in hopes that someone may see my answers and in that way gain a better understanding of St. John's, whether they have hopes of attending here or not. </p>
<p>It seemed as though Beam simply couldn't decide whether he wished he could be a Johnnie all the time, or whether he hated the entire idea. He tries to mock the school, but ends up sounding merely wishful. The final chapter of the book records his experiences at two Great Books conferences; he tells his readers how nice it was to discuss poetry with other bright people, and how informative the outside information could be.</p>
<p>If outside information is his main qualm with St. John's, then he truly missed out on his visit. Our schooling here doesn't only take place in classrooms (on whom he unleashes the full force of his sarcastic "information-gathering", portraying them as useless, ridiculous, and calling students un-prepared for discussion)-- it takes place outside as well. People share their knowledge, as well as insights learned from class, together outside. We add in our own opinions, perhaps unshared before, and facts that we have learned. </p>
<p>The curriculum is prepared in chronological order.
"If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".
It is silly to think that one can appreciate the insights of Aristotle without familiarity with Plato and Homer. Harvey's intuition and experiments regarding circulation of the blood are far less meaningful without Galen's ideas read before. In many ways, that is our outside information.... knowing what these brilliant men have learned shows you where they come from, learning what they themselves would have learned.</p>
<p>Derek is right. The Great Books fad of the mid 20th century is really nothing like what we do. There are no oversized volumes here, no print too small to read, nothing simply decorating our bookshelves.
For one- we read the books here.
For another- although the bookstore stocks various translations (not counting what one can find in the library and on Amazon, etc), many translations were found to be inadequate as the school began the New Program. The tutors here were not content to lead seminars on mistranslations- and <b> many have since written their own translation </b>. to aid us in our quest.
Discussing the works without accurate knowledge of what they said simply inures the reader.</p>
<p>We don't come here to learn how to be pretentious, as Beam implies about many of the Great Books Clubs and of the original seminars taught; We come here to learn how to think, to see what the Western world has thought since Greek civilization began thousands of years ago.</p>
<p>The changes to our curriculum weren't made out of shame. As I said before, reading things because of the author's gender or race is just as sad as not reading them for the same reason. It takes time for books to prove their value, and different people value things differently. By senior year, any student here has become familiar with such a wide range of powerful names, spending at least two classes (although I agree that this is far too short a time, I don't know what i would cut to allow for more in-depth study, and I don't see the Program being extended to five or six years....) on reading the author's works. All of the references to Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, classic Catholic thought, 17th century economics, whatever, - every senior is familiar with these and more... well able to judge on their own whatever 20th and 21st century books they may encounter. </p>
<p>St. John's is not a place to learn to impress others. It is a place to challenge yourself.
Again, it's not right for everyone.
But for those who choose to learn the way these thinkers learned, to begin to think on their own two feet, to translate works and understand the complexities of doing so--- SJC can be a wonderful, enriching experience.</p>