I first came across St. John’s College Great Books program reading a post from Farnam Street.
St. John’s College is the third oldest college in the United States, founded in 1696 as King William’s School in Maryland.
In 1937 Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan implemented their big idea, the New Program, which the college still follows today.
At the heart of St. John’s is a liberal arts curriculum focused on reading and discussing many of the greatest books and most important questions in history. This is perhaps the most distinctive undergraduate curriculum of any college in America.
The program can be consulted on their website and it’s subject to some changes (mostly in the elective books which count with some more recent ones). The version I use is this one from some years ago:
As you can see, the undergraduate program reading list follows some chronological order in the selection of its books for the different years; Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior. In all, the program requires reading over 160 great books in the curriculum and over 20 elective ones.
Scott Buchanan, an American philosopher and educator, met Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon while working at the People’s Institute in New York in the 1920s. There they conceived the idea of setting up this kind of Great Books curriculum, which they pursued with different degrees of success in different institutions. Buchanan tried it at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago and finally succeeded at St. John’s College. Adler worked on such an initiative together with Buchanan and Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago.
Adler and Hutchins later worked to launch the Great Books of the Western World book series, originally published in 1952 by the Encyclopædia Britannica, with 52 volumes in the first edition and 60 in the 1990 edition. This collection eventually sold a million copies. In the presentation of the first edition, Hutchins said:
“This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.“
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