Homer, Plato, Emily Dickinson, Cervantes, Jefferson, and Lincoln — what an inspiring list of great thinkers and writers, and what an exciting experience for young and old alike to pick up their work and make it new—to understand Great Books and Big Ideas in our lives and world.
Great Books are timeless. The classical heroes are precisely the heroes we seek today; the conflicts of our nation’s past foreshadow the issues we struggle with today.
Discussion leaders are catalysts of the students’ own ideas — they stoke their intellectual fires by asking careful questions, listening hard to their answers, and taking seriously all that each student has to say. This method of teaching by asking questions is at the heart of the Great Books tradition.
Our approach drives students to develop the habits of reflective reading, critical thinking, to recognize their own best thoughts, and to develop their ideas with care. Participants develop an easy ability to get to the key content, see the big ideas, and more readily understand the subtleties in the texts.
These are wonderful gifts to take back to the classroom, to help prepare for the new SAT and to bring to personal reading.