The Campaign for St. John's College
Campaign Statement - The Ideals of Liberal Education
At St. John's College, students discover within themselves a great power: the power to learn, the power to understand the ideas that form both their own lives as citizens of the world and those that attempt to explain how the universe is put together. Nurturing the life of the mind is liberal education’s single aim. The advances of technology and medicine, the great literature that breaks our hearts and mends our souls, the best ways to govern and improve society, the most profound ideas about the nature of what is real and our ability to know – liberal education enables us to understand these, and it inspires us to engage fully in the ongoing project of living a good life.
St. John’s College made a radical departure from the accepted structure of American higher education when, in 1937, it put aside departments and an elective system to adopt an all-required curriculum based on the reading, study, and discussion of great books. Tracing its beginning to the colonial King William’s School and chartered as a college in 1784, St. John’s already had a long history. This second founding of the college was carried out “with a clear and single purpose,” in the words of president Stringfellow Barr: to provide a true liberal education.
Today, with the Program based on great books and discussion fundamentally unchanged, St. John’s College holds to this single purpose.