St. John’s College, the Great Books school

If you’re looking for the best liberal arts education in the world, you’re looking for St. John’s College: Great Books curriculum, seminar classes, small residential colleges, outstanding teachers.

St. John’s has two campuses, the original site in Annapolis, Maryland (home of the U.S. Naval Academy), and the second campus founded in the 1960s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In Annapolis you get leafy avenues, historic buildings, and East Coast charm. In Santa Fe you get high desert, adobe, incredible skies, and New Mexican cuisine. I earned my master’s degree in the St. John’s Graduate Institute (three summers in Santa Fe, one in Annapolis), but have long regretted not going there as an undergraduate.

There are no lecture courses: all are seminars with no more than 20 in a class. The teachers are called “tutors” and they “teach everything” just as the students learn everything: literature, mathematics, science, languages, music, etc. If you like reading books, and discussing big ideas; if you aspire to being a truly well-educated person; if you’re looking for intellectual challenges; then St. John’s might be for you.

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