Not an alum, but in an effort to improve my written and spoken english, I picked up the list and read the about 80% of the content. I was kind to myself and skipped any book that I absolutely found a slog (there were only a few, Aristotle's metaphysics and some early of the dark age Christian philosophy). The book list is really good at telling you to skip the really irrelevant bits of ancient books.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.
RE 3: as an SJC alum, I found my reading speed slowed drastically both during and after four years spent reading and discussing these books. I found myself thinking while reading more often, making more connections within and between works.
That said, reading alone misses the meat of “The Program” (always capitalized!) - it’s the searching, pointed, urgent discussion of a work with others who share a common language (from all having read and discussed the earlier works in the Program) that provoked deep thought and reflection, held me to account for intellectual rigor, and built up my faculty for critical thinking.
> That said, reading alone misses the meat of “The Program” (always capitalized!) - it’s the searching, pointed, urgent discussion of a work with others who share a common language (from all having read and discussed the earlier works in the Program) that provoked deep thought and reflection, held me to account for intellectual rigor, and built up my faculty for critical thinking.
Is there anywhere online that achieves anything close to this for this curriculum for people who can’t attend full time in person? An HN for SJC curriculum?
>Is there anywhere online that achieves anything close to this for this curriculum for people who can’t attend full time in person? An HN for SJC curriculum?
St. John's recently expanded their part-time Graduate program to be online.
Is it usually a value-add or how often does the push for intellectual rigor slide to something else? Had a notoriously argumentative coworker from nearby SJ in SF. He’d always swear he was just asking questions or wanted to know why “they chose this way over another” but not so secretly just wanted the world to burn.
Lol. At SJC? Almost always a value-add. That said, what people are like once they’re out very much depends on the person.
Think of it like the light and dark sides of the force: skill in rhetoric can just as easily be used to derail conversations or slide into sophistry as it can to explore the foundations of an idea, argument, or position in search of insight.
Intellectual honesty tends to require a certain restraint from the practitioner, whereas resentment and anger can feed into deliberate conversational malice.
The forms of discourse at St. John’s contribute greatly to earnest inquiry in the classroom setting: the system of formal address, for instance, in which other students are addressed as, say, “Ms. Klein” or “Mr. Armstrong” in class creates an incredible separation between daily life and the classroom - enabling you to treat someone’s statements and arguments at face value.
My experience with St. John’s was that the Tutors (called professors anywhere else) generally managed to guide and keep conversations on track with a light, deft hand on such occasions as intervention was called for - this was increasingly rarely over the course of the Program, however, as keeping things directed and on track was primarily enforced by one’s fellow students, whose urgent pursuit of truth and understanding brooked no interference, and suffered very little foolishness.
My guess is your former coworker was probably just as argumentative before he came to St. John’s as when you met him. The school isn’t formative in the sense of changing your nature; it’s formative in the sense of giving you the tools to better understand the world around you. Most people left with the same personalities and political views they came in with.
On item 2, I did a project back in the 00s where I watched every movie I’d never seen¹ in the imdb top 500 (Netflix DVD and the library were a great resource for getting through this). It was great background for catching jokes that I’d missed on The Simpsons. Cultural literacy is a widely varied thing.
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1. There were a couple that I realized when I watched them that I had seen them, or at least parts of them when I was a kid, most notably Lawrence of Arabia. There were only a handful that felt like a burden to watch, and of those the only one I remember being bored silly by was Jules et Jim.
How long did it take you to read them? Did you read them in order as presented? Did you start with a strategy for retention or comprehension (especially with the non-modern English) so that it wouldn’t be wasted time?
From start to finish it probably took around 7-8 years. The booklist I had, started out pretty easy going (i.e. you were expected to read The Illiad in about 2 weeks), towards the fourth year it is frankly delusional how fast you are expected to read (War and Peace was assigned 1 week) and I have NO idea how the students in the course can do it. I was reading maybe 2 hrs a day whilst working fulltime.
Yes I read them in the order presented. The order kind of makes sense (sem 1 & 2: Ancient Greece, sem 3: Early christianity/rome, sem 4: renaissance, sem5/6: enlightenment, rise of democracy, sem 7/8: early modern period.) By the time you get to Shakespeare there are echoes of stories you have already read.
In terms of a strategy for retention, I kept a small book of quotes from the works and would add to them weekly (no idea where this is now).
I should say that the latter stages of the course has large sections that are for essay writing and projects. I skipped all this but added other books instead. These were mainly American literature (Twain, Fitzgerald, steinbeck), English literature (Bronte, Dickens, Orwell) and some older stuff (Suetonius, Xenophon).
I forget if War and Peace was the first book of a semester or whether it was over spring break, but long novels were typically scheduled so that you had some free time away to read them.
The books me and my friends found to be ass-kickers were the dense philosophy books with many seminars back-to-back, like how there were seven? on Critique of Pure Reason and six? on Phenomenology of the Spirit. Important books, to be sure, but there's a limit to endurance.
I found that reading so much ancient literature:
1. It ruined a lot of popular Hollywood movies for me as a lot of the modern stories are retellings of very old ones.
2. I finally got a whole lot of cultural references in modern literature that I missed previously. Many modern authors will name a character in a text as a callback to some old story (rocinante in 'the expanse' comes to mind).
3. I thought reading so much content would improve my reading speed, but since most of what i read was in weird greek prose, conversational aristotlean, iambic pentameter, or ye ole english it really didn't.