St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)

St. John's College

File:Sjcseal.jpg
Motto	Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque (I make free men from children by means of books and a balance)
Type	Private
Established	1696 as King William's School 1784, Chartered 1937, New Program
President	Christopher Nelson, Annapolis, Michael Peters, Santa Fe
Undergraduates	450-475 per campus
Postgraduates	100
Location	Annapolis, Maryland , Santa Fe, New Mexico , USA
Campus	Urban
Athletics	Croquet, Fencing, Crew, Sailing, Intramurals, Search and Rescue
Mascot	None (Platypus / Book)
Website	www.stjohnscollege.edu

St. John's College describes itself as one college on two campuses: St. John's College, Annapolis and St. John's College, Santa Fe. As the successor to the King William's School, a grammar school founded in 1696, St. John's College, Annapolis was chartered in 1784, making it one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the U.S.

Since 1937, the school has followed an unusual curriculum, called The New Program or the Great Books Program, based on discussion of works from the Western philosophic and literary canon.

Despite its name, St. John's College has no religious affiliation. The school grants only one bachelor's degree. Two master's degrees are currently available, one in Western classics, which is a modified version of the undergraduate curriculum, and a parallel course of studies in Eastern Classics. The Master's in Eastern Classics is unique to St. John's Santa Fe, as no other accredited institution of higher learning in North America offers a similar degree. Both graduate degrees are awarded to graduate students through the college's Graduate Institute.

The Great Books program

The Great Books program (often called simply "the Program" at St. John's) was developed at the University of Chicago by Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler in the mid-1930s as an alternate form of education to the then rapidly changing undergraduate curriculum. St. John's adopted the Great Books program in 1937, when the college was facing the possibility of financial and academic ruin. The Great Books program in use today was heavily influenced by Jacob Klein, who was Dean of the college in the 1940s and 1950s.

The four-year program of study, nearly all of which is mandatory, demands that students read and discuss the works of many of Western civilization's most prominent contributors to philosophy, theology, mathematics, science, music, poetry, and literature, such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Einstein. In line with the views of the program's founders—who complained of "vocational interests" that "clutter" other college's curricula—"Johnnies", as St. John's students style themselves, usually value intellectual pursuits for their own sake, regardless of whether they have practical application. Classes at St. John's are exclusively discussion-based. All classes, and in particular the Seminar, are considered formal exercises. Consequently, students address one another, as well as their teachers, only by their last names during class.

Unlike mainstream U.S. colleges, St. John's eschews contemporary textbooks, lectures, and examinations. While traditional (A through F) grades are given, the culture of the school deemphasizes their importance and grades are released only at the request of the student. Grading is based largely on class participation and papers. Tutors, as faculty members are called at the College, play a non-directive role in the classroom, compared to mainstream colleges. However, at St. John's this does vary somewhat by course and instructor.

History

File:Stringfellow Barr.jpg

Stringfellow Barr, a co-founder of the new program, was a constant supporter.

St. John's College was chartered in 1784 and later began granting bachelor's degrees. The first act of the newly chartered school was the incorporation of King William's School, a defunct grammar school established in 1696. The college took up residence in a building known as Bladen's Folly (the current McDowell Hall), which was originally built to be the Maryland governor's mansion, but was not completed. There was some association with the Freemasons early in the college's history, leading to speculation that it was named after Saint John the Evangelist, the patron saint of Freemasonry. The College's original charter, reflecting the Masonic value of religious tolerance as well as the religious diversity of the founders (they included both Presbyterians and Episcopalians), stated that "youth of all religious denominations shall be freely and liberally admitted."

The College curriculum has taken various forms throughout its history. Although it began with a general program of study in the liberal arts, St. John's was a military school for much of the 19th century. In contrast to Washington and Lee University, a contemporary institution, the College always maintained a small size, generally enrolling fewer than 500 men at a time.

In 1936, the College lost its accreditation. The Board of Visitors and Governors, faced with dire financial straits caused by the Great Depression, invited educational innovators Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan to make a completely fresh start. They introduced a new program of study, which is essentially the one still in effect as of 2006. Buchanan became dean of the College, while Barr assumed its presidency.

In his guide Cool Colleges, Donald Asher writes that the New Program was implemented to save the college from closing: "Several benefactors convinced the college to reject a watered-down curriculum in favor of becoming a very distinctive academic community. Thus this great institution was reborn as a survival measure."

In 1938, Walter Lippman wrote a column praising liberal arts education as a bulwark against fascism, and said "in the future, men will point to St. John’s College and say that there was the seed-bed of the American renaissance."

In 1940, national attention was attracted to St. John's by a story in Life Magazine entitled: The Classics: At St. John's They Come into Their Own Once More.

Classic works unavailable in English translation were translated by faculty members, typed, mimeographed, and bound. They were sold to the general public as well as to students, and by 1941 the St. John's College bookshop was famous as the only source for English translations of works such as Copernicus's Revolutions of the Celestial Sphere, St. Augustine's De Musica, and Ptolemy's Almagest.

The wartime years were difficult for the all-male St. John's. Enlistment and the draft all but emptied the college; 15 seniors graduated in 1943, 8 in 1945, and 3 in 1946.

From 1940 to 1946, St. John's was repeatedly confronted with threats of its land being seized by the Navy for expansion of the Naval Academy. In 1945, James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, announced plans to seize the St. John's campus for expansion of the U.S. Naval academy. At the time, the New York Times, which had expected a legal battle royal comparable to the Dartmouth case, commented that "although a small college of fewer than 200 students, St. John's has, because of its experimental liberal arts program, received more publicity and been the center of a greater academic controversy than most other colleges in the land. Its best-books program has been attacked and praised by leading educators of the day."

The constant threat of eviction discouraged Stringfellow Barr. In late 1946 Forrestal withdrew the plan, in the face of public opposition and the disapproval of the House Naval Affairs Committee, but Barr and Scott Buchanan were already committed to leaving St. John's and attempting to launch a new, similar college in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; the project eventually failed.

In 1949, Richard D. Weigle (pronounced "why-gull") became president of St. John's. Following a difficult and chaotic period from 1940 to 1949, Weigle's presidency continued for 31 years, during which the college and New Program became well established as continuing institutions.

In 1951, St. John's became coeducational, admitting women for the first time in its then–254-year history.

In 1961, the governing board of St. John's approved plans to establish a second college at Santa Fe, New Mexico. According to Western mystery writer Tony Hillerman, the site selection committee originally had expected to locate in Claremont, California, and reluctantly accepted an invitation to inspect a New Mexico site. Hillerman spins a tale of the committeemen:

made pale from the weak sun of the coastal climate and their scholarly profession, generally urban, generally Eastern, solidly W.A.S.P. They came from a world which was old Anglo-Saxon family, old books, Greek and Latin literacy, prep schools and Blue Point oysters and Ivy League; a world bounded on the north by Boston... and on the south by Virginia.

According to Hillerman, the Eastern scholars became captivated by the Sangre de Cristo range and the presence of mule deer tracks. Groundbreaking occurred on April 22, 1963, and the first classes began in 1964.

In 1969, Weigle was among 79 college presidents signing an October 9 letter to Richard M. Nixon urging a stepped-up timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. The letter said they were "speaking as individuals" and described the war as "a denial of so much that is best in their society."

Annapolis campus

McDowell hall at St. John's is a major landmark in Annapolis.

St. John's is located in the Historic Annapolis district, one block away from the Maryland State Capitol building. Its proximity to the United States Naval Academy has inspired many a comparison to Athens and Sparta. The schools carry on a spirited rivalry seen in the annual croquet match between the two schools on the front lawn of St. John's, which has been called by Gentleman's Quarterly (GQ) "the purest intercollegiate athletic event in America." St. John's has won 19 out of the last 24 matches.

The center of campus, McDowell Hall, was built in 1742. Its Great Hall has seen many college events, from balls feting Generals Lafayette and Washington to the unique St. John's institutions called waltz parties. Despite their name, waltz parties have gradually evolved to consist mostly of swing dancing, though waltz, polka, and even some tango are still played. Champagne and strawberries have been known to be served, and it is not uncommon for students, especially the ladies, to dress in quite formal evening ballroom attire.

Santa Fe campus

File:Weigle.jpg

Weigle Hall (behind the pond) was named after the president who presided over the construction of the new college in Santa Fe, and eventually became president of both campuses at once. Today each college has its own president.

St. John's is located at the foot of Monte Sol, on the eastern edge of Santa Fe. It was opened in 1964 due to the increase in qualified applicants at the Annapolis campus. The College chose to open a second campus rather than increase the size of the Annapolis campus. The second campus was part of a larger project, championed by then-college president Richard Weigle, which called for six campuses to be built across the country. St. John's abandoned the concept when it sold a tract of land it owned in Monterry, California.

The Santa Fe campus offers students a more secluded atmosphere than the Annapolis campus, with the vast Pecos Wilderness and Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The campus also boasts an expansive view of Santa Fe which extends to Los Alamos to the west.

The college maintains gear to facilitate student use of the outdoors, such as kayaks, rafts, hiking equipment, and sports equipment. In addition, the college Search and Rescue team is recognized throughout the Southwest, participating in a wide variety of rescue missions in conjunction with the New Mexico State Police and other volunteer teams.

Curriculum overview

File:Stjohnschair.jpg

The Chair (a wooden chair with wicker seat), used at both campuses by all students and tutors, is a somewhat iconic figure at the college.

The program involves:

• Four years of literature, philosophy, and political science in seminar
• Four years of mathematics
• Three years of laboratory science
• One and a half years of Ancient Greek
• One and a half years of French
• Freshman year chorus followed by sophomore year music

The Great Books are not the only texts used at St. John's. Greek and French classes make use of supplemental materials that are more like traditional textbooks. Science laboratory courses and mathematics courses use manuals prepared by faculty members that combine source materials with workbook exercises. For example, the mathematics tutorial combines a 1905 paper by Albert Einstein with exercises that require the student to work through the mathematics used in the paper.

Nevertheless, the emphasis on source materials is strong; all seminar readings are from the book list, and music is studied from scores that are primary sources.

The only elective courses are brief "preceptorials" offered in the winter of the junior and senior years. The options for these classes change each year, and often include courses on topics not covered in the Great Books program, including works by authors beyond the "dead white males" who dominate the Great Books list.

No written tests are given, apart from occasional quizzes in language tutorials and an algebra test to be passed by the end of sophomore year. Students are evaluated based on class participation and papers. In the seminar, an oral examination is also given each semester. This examination is a discussion with the tutor or tutors intended to show that the student has read and understood the material covered. In-term written assignments consist of occasional short (usually less than 10 pages) papers. Longer papers are required for seminars. On the Santa Fe campus students must write seminar papers at the end of each semester. The paper for the spring semester is a longer paper, and is awarded a separate grade on the transcript. Students at the Annapolis campus write a single longer (20-30 pages) essay at the end of each year. Papers for tutorials and seminars are not research papers, and emphasize the individual student's analysis of a work or interpretation of an idea or theory. Of particular importance is the sophomore annual essay, which plays a prominent role in the college's formal decision to allow a student to continue into the final two years. In their senior year, students must also write and defend a full-length thesis. Defense of a Senior Essay is open to the public, with the student engaging in discussion of his or her essay with a panel of three tutors.

Don Rags

While the school does not release grades to students (except upon direct request), there is an evaluation system. At the end of every semester at St. John's, a student comes together with his tutors to hear what they think of his academic performance.

Don Rags begin with each tutor discussing the student's performance in the third person to his colleagues. The discussion takes place as if the student were not there. After this, the student is asked if he has anything he'd like to add. Once the discussion is over the tutors decide whether or not the student should continue at the college.

For the first semester of junior year, students have a conference (instead of a Don Rag), in which the students first report on their progress and then hear responses from their tutors.

The regular Don Rag format continues for the student's last Don Rag, which is at the end of junior year.

The term "Don Rag" comes from England, where professors ("Dons") would rag on their students.

Ranking and reputation

In 1975, a St. John's graduate gave this description of how a St. John's degree was received by other institutions:

Bernard M. Davidoff, M. D., a graduate of St. John's in 1969 and of Columbia Medical School... said the medical schools to which he applied reacted to his unconventional preparation in two ways. "Those who had not heard of St. John's were not impressed. Those who knew of the college generally waived requirements." Like most St. John's alumni who enter medical school, he took an undergraduate course in organic chemistry at another college. Dr. Davidoff... cited only one difficulty in adapting to medical school. "I didn't have any interesting people to talk to," he recalled.

Motivational business speaker Zig Ziglar included a chapter on "St. John's: A College That Works" in a 1997 book. He said St. John's holds fast to the "medieval" notion that all knowledge is one and states that "the books they use are terribly hard." He notes that the school "ranks fifth nationally in the number of graduates earning doctorates in the humanities" and is impressed by the 81% of graduates entering education, engineering, law, medicine, and other professions. He concludes "Sounds like St. John's is onto something. Maybe more schools should take that approach."

According to a study published by the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, based on data from 1992 through 2001, St. John's ranked first nationally in percentage of graduates attaining PhDs in both Humanities and English Literature. In addition, the college ranked among the top ten institutions in Political Science, Linguistics, Foreign Languages, Area & Ethnic Studies, and Math & Computer Sciences.

St. John's runs counter to the usual emphasis on rankings and selectivity. As of 2005, St. John's college has chosen not to participate in any collegiate rankings surveys, has not sent them their requested survey information. However, the school is still included in the influential U.S News college ranking guide. The school ranks in the third tier, perhaps as a result of the school's decision not to send information to U.S News. President Christopher B. Nelson states that "In principle, St. John's is opposed to rankings." He notes that

Over the years, St. John's College has been ranked everywhere from third, second, and first tier, to one of the "Top 25" liberal arts colleges. Yet, the curious thing is: We haven't changed. Our mission and our methods have been virtually constant for almost 60 years. So when it comes to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, we would rather be ourselves and have our college speak for itself, than be subjected to fluctuating outside analysis.

An educational reporter wrote:

Unlike many top-flight liberal arts colleges, St. John's isn't all that hard to get into: The school accepts 75 to 80 percent of applicants, primarily based on three written essays and, to a certain extent, grades. There is no application fee, and standardized tests, like the Scholastic Assessment Test, are optional. About three-quarters of the enrolled students ranked in the top half of their high school class, but only one fifth graduated in the top tenth. School officials said that's because they're less concerned that the applicant show a body of accumulated knowledge than a true desire for attaining it.

Still, the College Board reports that nearly all students submit SAT scores, and those of St. John's students are among the highest in the nation, with the middle 50% of first year students scoring between 660-780 on the SAT Reasoning Verbal and 590-680 on the SAT Reasoning Math.

Princeton Review's list of the twenty colleges with the "happiest students" includes both St. John's campuses, the Santa Fe campus ranking seventh and the Annapolis campus ranking seventeenth.

St. John's has a reputation for being politically liberal — in the past it has made several of the liberal lists on the Princeton Review. However, that reputation may not be completely accurate (even in the case of the Santa Fe campus, which is often regarded as more liberal than Annapolis) — while the campus is left-leaning politically, one commentator in the Princeton Review warns: "This isn't really a good place for wandering hippie types who subscribe to a pluralist philosophy of absolute tolerance." In particular, the college's ethos does not support students who disagree with the fundamental principles of the Great Books program. The college also has links to conservative political figures. The wife of Republican Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld served on the college's Board of Visitors and Governors, and through this connection a past college president, John Agresto, was selected to oversee the rebuilding of the higher-education system in Iraq.

Student body

As of the 2005 class, 35 U.S. states are represented in Annapolis and 32 in Santa Fe; there are also several students from foreign countries. Approximately 65% of students receive financial aid.

Notable people associated with St. John's

• Eva Brann, tutor; 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
• James M. Cain, novelist; was professor of journalism at St. John's from 1923 to 1924. Later famous for hard-boiled noir novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice.
• Elliott Carter, composer; taught courses in physics, mathematics and classical Greek, as well as music, at St. John's from 1939 to 1941.
• Clement Dorsey, Congressman for Maryland's 1st congressional district, 1825-1831.
• Ahmet Ertegun; founded Atlantic Records in 1947.
• Hillary Fields, alumna; romance novelist; won the Pushcart Prize for a short story in 1998.
• Jac Holzman founded Elektra Records in 1950 while a student at St. John's.
• Alexander Contee Hanson (Class of 1802), Congressman for Maryland's 3rd District, 1813-1816.
• Francis Scott Key, alumnus; lyricist of the United States national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.
• Tom G. Palmer, alumnus; Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
• Gerald Peters, real-estate developer and owner of galleries in Santa Fe, NM. Twenty-fifth–richest man in New Mexico in October 1996.
• Lisa Simeone, host, National Public Radio.
• Leo Strauss, political philosopher; lectured at St. John's.
• Edwin Warfield, 45th Governor of Maryland, 1904–1908
• Francis Thomas, Governor of Maryland, 1842-1844; member of House of Representatives, 1861-1869.
• Warren Winiarski, founder of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.
• Glenn Yarbrough, original lead tenor of The Limeliters.
• Lee David Zlotoff, creator of MacGyver.
• Louis Leo Snyder, German scholar and historian, alumnus.
• Daniel Littleton, Erik Fisher and Colin Meeder of the Hated all attended St. John's; Fisher graduated in 1992 and Meeder in 1993.

Curriculum details

The Great Books

The same set of Great Books is the basis of the curriculum at both campuses of St. John's College. As of 2005, it is:

Freshman year

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Euripides: Hippolytus, The Bacchae
Herodotus: Histories
Aristophanes: Clouds, Birds
Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
Euclid: Elements
Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
Plutarch: Lycurgus, Solon
Nicomachus: Arithmetic
Antoine Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
William Harvey: Motion of the Heart and Blood
Essays by: Archimedes, Blaise Pascal, Gabriel Fahrenheit, Amedeo Avogadro, Joseph Black, John Dalton, Cannizzaro, Virchow, Edme Mariotte, Hans Driesch, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Hans Spemann, Stears, J.J. Thomson, Dmitri Mendeleev, Berthollet, Joseph Proust

Sophomore year

The Bible
Aristotle: De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
Apollonius: Conics
Virgil: Aeneid
Plutarch: Caesar and Cato the Younger
Epictetus: Discourses, Manual
Tacitus: Annals
Ptolemy: Almagest
Plotinus: The Enneads
Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
Anselm of Canterbury: Proslogion
Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, Summa Contra Gentiles
Dante: Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Josquin Des Prez: Mass
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, Discourses on Livy
Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Spheres
Martin Luther: The Freedom of a Christian
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli
Michel de Montaigne: Essays
François Viète: Introduction to the Analytical Art
Francis Bacon: Novum Organum
William Shakespeare: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Sonnets
Poems by: Andrew Marvell, John Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
René Descartes: Geometry, Discourse on Method
Blaise Pascal: Generation of Conic Sections
Johann Sebastian Bach: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
Joseph Haydn: Quartets
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Operas
Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonatas
Franz Schubert: Songs
Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms

Junior year

Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Galileo Galilei: Dialogues on Two New Sciences
René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
John Milton: Paradise Lost
François de La Rochefoucauld: Maximes
Jean de La Fontaine: Fables
Blaise Pascal: Pensées
Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Baruch Spinoza: Theologico-Political Treatise
John Locke: Second Treatise of Government
Jean Racine: Phèdre
Isaac Newton: Principia Mathematica
Johannes Kepler: Epitome IV
Gottfried Leibniz: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Social Contract, Discourse on Origins of Inequality
Molière: The Misanthrope
Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations
Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Metaphysics of Morals
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Richard Dedekind: Essay on the Theory of Numbers
Leonhard Euler

Senior year

Declaration of Independence
The Constitution
Supreme Court opinions
Hamilton, Jay, and Madison: The Federalist Papers
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind, "Logic" (from the Encyclopedia)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky: Theory of Parallels
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches
Søren Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
Karl Marx: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
Herman Melville: Benito Cereno
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Flannery O'Connor: Parker's Back, The Artificial Nigger
Sigmund Freud: General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Booker T. Washington: Selected Writings
W. E. B. DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk
Martin Heidegger: What is Philosophy?
Werner Heisenberg: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
Robert Millikan: The Electron
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Essays by: Michael Faraday, J.J. Thomson, Gregor Mendel, Hermann Minkowski, Ernest Rutherford, Clinton Davisson, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, James Clerk Maxwell, Louis-Victor de Broglie, Dreisch, Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Theodor Boveri, Walter Sutton, Morgan, Beadle and Tatum, Gerald Jay Sussman, Watson and Crick, Jacob & Monod, G. H. Hardy

Criticism and controversy

St. John's curriculum has drawn criticism and controversy since its inception. It went far beyond the then-existing Columbia University and University of Chicago Great Books programs in making the Great Books the entire curriculum rather than one of many courses of study, and in extending the Great Books approach to the sciences as well as the humanities.

Writing in 1938, just after the first group of freshmen completed their first semester under the new curriculum, Stringfellow Barr insisted that there was nothing radical about the curriculum and that it was

merely carrying out the terms of the eighteenth century charter of St. John's and restoring discipline in the liberal arts and an acquaintance with our intellectual heritage in place of the vocational interests and cafeteria courses that clutter our liberal arts curricula today.

He referred to "opponents of the St. John's program" and said that they consider it "authoritarian and fascist." He said that some "suspect that some sort of Catholic indoctrination is being attempted" because of the inclusion of Aristotle and medieval scholastic works in the curriculum, while "Catholic educators have denounced the list for including Marx and Freud."

In a 1944 essay, Sidney Hook was highly critical of the "St. John's experiment". In particular, he asked whether the presentation of science and mathematics through historical texts instead of conventional systematic study actually helped students "acquire greater competence in mathematics and science or a better insight into their character as liberal arts." By way of answer, he quoted three prominent mathematicians and scientists who opposed a historical approach to scientific education.

Hook quotes Richard Courant:

"There is no doubt that it is unrealistic to expect a scientific enlightenment of beginners by the study of Euclid, Appolonius or Ptolemy. It will just give them an oblique perspective of what is important and what is not. Studying the more modern works by Descartes, Newton, etc., except for a few single items, would be even more difficult and likewise not lead to a balanced understanding of mathematics."

Bertrand Russell:

"The subject on which you write is one about which I feel very strongly. I think the 'Best Hundred Books' people are utterly absurd on the scientific side. I was myself brought up on Euclid and Newton and I can see the case for them. But on the whole Euclid is much too slow-moving. Boole is not comparable to his successors. Descartes' geometry is surpassed by every modern textbook of analytical geometry. The broad rule is: historical approach where truth is unattainable, but not in a subject like mathematics or anatomy. (They read Harvey!)"

and Albert Einstein:

"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."

St. John's provokes to an intensified degree the long-standing question of whether a liberal arts degree is suitable preparation for modern-day employment. In the case of St. John's, the question is intensified because of St. John's idiosyncratic program and educational philosophy.

Robert Hutchins defended that educational philosophy in 1937, insisting that other educational methods "fail in all respects—we don't get either good practitioners or well-educated people." He said that thirty-six industries in Minneapolis and St. Paul, answering a questionnaire, said that they preferred "no specific education in schools" for their workers.

In his 1987 book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, Ernest L. Boyer lampoons St. John's College, claiming that "The fixed curriculum of the colonial era is as much an anachronism today as the stocks in the village square."

Ptolemy Stone

The two campuses of St. John's College are said to be the only places in the world to have a Ptolemy Stone, which is an astronomical instrument invented by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy to measure the altitude of celestial bodies, in this case, the sun. The Ptolemy Stone at St. John's takes the form of outdoor rectangular prismical column of concrete with a movable metal dial. This device was the precursor to the sextant. Freshman and sophomore math classes learn to use this stone to calculate the apparent movement of the sun across the ecliptic.

Saint Mary's College of California, however, has a similar claim, having erected what students refer to as "the Plinth" over 45 years ago.

See also

• Shimer College
• Mortimer Adler
• Stringfellow Barr
• Allan Bloom
• Harold Bloom
• Scott Buchanan
• Robert Hutchins

• Colonial Colleges: Details on St. John's antiquity vis-a-vis other old U. S. colleges
• Educational perennialism
• Great Books
• Harrison Middleton University
• Liberal Arts, Inc. Failed attempt by Barr and Buchanan to start a Great Books-based college in the Massachusetts Berkshires, a mile-and-a-half from Tanglewood.
• Western canon
• Narrative evaluation

External links

• St. John's College official website
• Colleges and Universities that have some form of Great Books program—includes universities with "core curriculum" programs and universities with "Great Books" courses as options. (Last updated in 1998, this reference is helpful but not current. Shimer College, for example, no longer appears to exist.)