THE GREAT BOOKS PROGRAM AT ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE

    St. John's College believes that the way to a liberal education lies through a direct and sustained confrontation with the books in which the greatest minds of our civilization have expressed themselves, and through rigorous exercise in translation, mathematical demonstration, music analysis, and laboratory science. To that end, the College offers a four-year, nonelective program in which students read, discuss, and write about the seminal works that have shaped the world in which we live.
    The books that are at the heart of learning at St. John's stand among the original sources of our intellectual tradition. They are timeless and timely; they not only illuminate the persisting questions of human existence, but also have great relevance to the contemporary problems with which we have to deal. They therefore enter directly into our everyday lives. Their authors speak to us as freshly as when they first spoke. They change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits. What they have to tell us is not something of merely academic concern, or remote from our real interests. At St. John's books are not treated reverently or digested whole; they are dissected, mulled over, interpreted, doubted, often rejected, often accepted. They serve to foster thinking, not to dominate it.
    St. John's College has campuses at Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Note that classical music is included in the curriculum.