Notes from the New Program

It's been about a month and change since the beginning of my classes here at St. John's College, which I feel is a sufficient amount of time to have settled (in a manner of speaking) into a comfortable nook and hit a regular enough stride to begin the process of creating informed observations about this, the product of Stringfellow Barr's New Program.

I learned about the Program around the time I was graduating from high school. It was just a footnote in a newspaper which caught my eye: Great Books! Intellectuals! The pursuit of beauty, truth, and love! I was entranced, and intimidated, so I shelved the name of the school in the depths of my mind. It wasn't until three years later that I had found the potent cocktail of overconfidence and desperation that brought me back to St. John's to get myself what I wanted to be a worthwhile education. An education that didn't prepare me for a career, as the admissions folks are fond of reminding us, but for my entire life. I thought St. John's would be the panacea that would turn me into the man I want to be.

I have moved past those superficial impressions which came during my arrival in Santa Fe which filled me with the sort of inspired zeal to run into my books with a whole-hearted attempt to solve the riddles of those ageless questions on the nature of beauty, valor, and human nature. Instead, I find myself taking cues from other Johnnies (given parlance for a member of the student body, or associated alumni). For the most part this has ranged, depending on the relative cynicism of the advice-giver, from wry suggestions to drop out while I still have a hold on some semblance of innocence, to frank suggestions to kill myself while I still have a hold on some semblance of a soul. More often, folks have congratulated my choice on coming to the school, expressed concern that the January Freshman program, in attempting to squeeze 36 weeks of instruction into 26, is potentially crazy-making, and I've received countless admonitions to keep up with my Greek.

I should, I guess, stop and explain exactly what goes on at St. John's, at least in terms of how I understand how it should work. St. John's College operates around a couple very significant proper nouns, namely the Program, and the Great Books. The Program, in and of itself, refers to Stringfellow Barr's New Program, the curriculum instituted in the mid-20^th century as a radical departure from the "liberal education" model that defined liberal arts colleges of the time, and still influences them today. Rather than operate on a stand-and-deliver model of pedagogy, professors (recast as "tutors" at St. John's), instead rely on Socratic discussion and primary source texts, the so-called "Great Books" or "Western Canon". Through an all-required curriculum, which includes four years of language instruction, (two of Ancient Greek, and two of French) four years of mathematics, three years of lab sciences, and utilizes a reading list which begins with Homer, and ends, in Senior year, with Woolf after poring through the Bible, Kant, and Rousseau, St. John's has the stated mission of creating more whole thinkers. Men and women able to apply a variety of developed intellectual skills and insights into most every situation.

I, like most students, came because of the Reading List: it was everything I ever wanted to read, and knew I'd never get around to unless I made it the central focus of my life for a while. Happily, I've found a way to have my cake, and get a degree too. The upshot is that I've had the opportunity, so far, to find like minds to talk about these books with the sort of eye toward meaning that inspires all manner of deeper thought. Johnnies, at least the ones that last, are people who want to be here because they're fundamentally interested in the course of study that they pursue here. Sure, they may approach it cynically, with all the disillusionment that comes with being a modern human being, but something about the earnestness that allows them to put up with a ridiculous workload which may include several dozen hours of Greek homework a week, or preparing to present Euclid's geometric propositions with confidence from memory in front of a classroom betrays a sense of reverence for the mission of the college.

Somehow, in spite of ourselves, we've found ourselves caring about what others think, if only because we're beginning to glimpse that it is only by testing our own ideas that we can find ourselves moving closer to truth.