JC, for a long time I was an active alumnus of St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe, non- sectarian). My wife, in fact, was the Director of Alumni Activities. As you may know, the heart of the St. John's program is the seminar, in which the core of the Great Books are read and discussed, beginning with the Iliad, and ending with Freud (well, really a reprise of a Platonic dialogue, the Phaedrus). During junior and senior years, there are lengthy periods where seminars break for preceptorials, which are essentially seminars with greater focus. For example, my junior year, I had a preceptorial on the Canterbury Tales, and my senior year, on several Platonic dialogues.
Anyway, for years I participated in seminars in alumni chapters in New York, Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, and several other cities (I even got out to LA and San Francisco), on varied texts, some found in the curriculum, some novelties. I myself was often responsible for choosing readings for activities like Homecoming (yes, at St. John's, these seminars are core activities), for example, chapters from William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience" or Shaw's "Major Barbara". From time to time I even lead seminars. I did a "short course" in Boston on existentialism, one seminar per year for a few years, and added it to it, doing it in a shorter time frame, in Annapolis. (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Buber, Sartre). I also did extensive seminars on Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics".
Now, a St. John's seminar uses a text, and tries to extract some meaning from it, but it is a fairly wide ranging, thematic discussion. The leader of the seminar opens with a question, and perhaps with some helpful comments, to get things going, and tries to make sure the conversation is productive, but basically it is pretty free- form, and can degenerate into a bull session at its worst.
As it happens, people do, in fact, learn to have serious discussions on a myriad of topics with civility and the ability to air most issues profitably, as they participate at St. John's as students. It is better to talk with them as adults, frankly, when they are more experienced and "grounded", but the main lines of conduct were learned at St. John's.
I am not saying that every seminar is great, or that there are never any people one would like to heave out the door. But compared to my experiences with seminars, the threads are the Okefenokee Swamp. This is not a mere matter of "1-D" versus "3-D", but has to do with the norms of the threads, or lack of them, growing out of the utter heterogeneity of the participants. This is not to say that alumni were utterly homogeneous, but they had similar experiences in school, a similar understanding of appropriate conduct, and at least some agreement on standards of argument.
For various reasons, I have taken a break from alumni activities, but I like to discuss things, and the threads were a way to get a new perspective on things. When I first came on, I was appalled, and not sure I would stay. But I decided that I would get a better sense of "real life" if I stayed. That is what works for me: the commitment to dealing with a wider array of people, and to see what comes of it, sacrificing order and comfort for experience........ |
