How Can History’s Greatest Books Inform the Future?

3,000 YEARS OF RELENTLESS QUESTIONING

At St. John’s, the books are the teachers. Imagine learning philosophy from Plato and Nietzsche; politics from Machiavelli and Abraham Lincoln; economics from Adam Smith and Karl Marx; justice from Alexander Hamilton and Frederick Douglass; literature from Jane Austen and Toni Morrison; physics from Ptolemy and Albert Einstein; biology from William Harvey and Charles Darwin; and poetry from Sappho and Emily Dickinson. These texts are both timeless and timely.

You will read more than 200 of the greatest books in history without relying on a textbook to tell you what to think. Beginning in Ancient Greece, Johnnies grapple with questions of human nature and reality — questions that have puzzled our species for millennia. From there, we accelerate through history, examining today’s challenges via the perspectives of Isaac Newton, Virginia Woolf, W.E.B. Du Bois, and so many more.

Junior and senior year, you’ll increase the range and depth of your learning through preceptorials. These elective classes of 10 or fewer students focus on a single topic — either from outside the curriculum or within it — which is often proposed by students.