A Visit to St. John's College Can Transform Your Summer Vacation Adventure

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On a mountainside campus overlooking the mountains and desert of New Mexico, St. John's College offers a unique summer vacation to intellectual risk-takers. A "Great Books" college whose undergraduate curriculum consists of reading 100 acknowledged masterpieces of the western literary and philosophical tradition, St. John's opens its classrooms and dorms from July 12 to July 30 of this year (2010) to adults of all ages, who pursue seminars in which, for several hours each day, they discuss their choice of great books (Summer Classics) with tutors of St. John.

Photo credit: James Long/Flickr.com

My wife and I attended the very first summer presentation of Summer Classics in which we read and discussed Thuycidides' Peloponesian Wars for a full week. It was an adventure so memorable that we returned the next summer for a week of reading and discussing Dante's Inferno.

St. John has now announced the books that will be the centerpiece of seminars in July of 2010. They include Plato's Republic, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Balzac's Le Père Goriot, Homer's Iliad, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx' Das Kapital, Mozart's opera The Magic Flute among several others. The discussion of each will be led by famous faculty members of the College, who will also participate in various receptions, dinners, and other events included in the program. There are no entrance requirements for participants, no tests or examinations, no grades given. You pursue learning for the love of learning.

But it isn't cheap. The weeklong seminars cost $1,250; on-campus room and board in a single suite are $510 for a week. But the total of $1,760, plus the cost of transportation to and from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is regarded by many former participants as a remarkable bargain. Certainly, there is nothing comparable in the world of vacations in the United States.

To learn more, you can request a catalog on Summer Classics by visiting St. John's website at www.stjohnscollege.edu/outreach/SF/SC/classics.shtml.

Source: A Week or Two at St. John's College Can Transform a Summer Vacation Into an Intellectual Adventure

[Aramide olawale]

som1 should take me there o