Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 02:22:50 -0700 From: Moira Russell Subject: The Program > You > seem to have been magically propelled through St. John's and your exact > feelings toward it are bit hard to decipher. Do you think it's all it's > cracked up to be? I guess I am curious whether the Great Books Program > is by any measure superior to a standard college curriculum or whether > the advantages which St. John's touts are delusions....Do you think that the >St. John's program offers any serious > benefits which standard curriculums do not? Are those serious benefits > accompanied by equally serious problems? I think any St. John's graduate (undergrad or grad programs -- or anyone who has been at SJC for a year or two) will have mixed feelings about the College and the Program, and I am no exception. It was one of the best experiences of my life and I wouldn't have missed it for anything, but I was frequently disappointed, frustrated, and disheartened. I thought and talked a lot about leaving, and so did most of the other people I knew; I left after junior year, which is sort of like being helicoptered off Mt. Everest after you've made it 3/4 of the way up, but this saved my sanity. Nevertheless, I was always sad I didn't graduate, and some part of me was deeply unsatisfied until I went back and worked my way through a rather abridged version of the Program in the graduate department. I think maybe one of the best ways to let you know what St. John's is like is to point out some of the things you may _not_ enjoy, or which may _not_ be beneficial, since what St. John's does give is a little hard to express -- as a friend of mine once said in exasperation when I, as a prospective student, was quizzing him over What It Was Like: "St. John's is like having sex. You know what it's like if you've had it -- but if you haven't -- it's really hard to understand from a _description_." First: if you are not someone who relates easily to other people, who has a hard time speaking up in public, or who finds it easier to work ideas out on paper in private, this is not the school for you. This is not something which is talked about often in the official college literature, but a lot of the work (apart from reading) is more or less off-the-top-of-your-head discussions with roughly twenty other people who most certainly will not have the same opinions you do. When it works, it works beautifully: it's like playing music with a string quartet, only you're intellectually working out ideas which you may never have thought of and which seem to strike everyone at the same time - -- it can be a wonderful example of harmony and communication. But students who remain quiet for most of the seminars/tutorials frequently do worse when it comes to grades, because there's often no other way to show you've read the books. Grades are often Not Discussed. It's often considered gauche to admit you even look at them. I don't think there are many people who actually go through all four years never looking (I knew two or three such hardy souls), but one tutor said to me about my freshman-year roommate: "She had all these discussions with me about how to get an _A_. She wanted to know how to get an _A_ and that was _it_" -- and his voice was incredibly contemptuous. There's a certain anti-grade, anti-graduate school, anti-practical-application side to St. John's: you're here to read the Books and talk about the Books. Sometimes bringing up whether or not you'll get a good grade with a tutor is a sure way to get marked down. People are frequently unprepared, there's a lot of bullshit floating around, sometimes you get a really snarly group of people who can't relate to each other all that well, and -- this is a small detail but it's traumatic for nearly everyone who goes there at least once -- it is very, very difficult to switch classes. This isn't talked about much in the literature either. If you find yourself in a bad tutorial, or a worse seminar, you may have to do a lot of fancy tap-dancing to somehow miraculously work your way into another class. I've known people to say novenas to somehow switch from A's precept to B's. I've never quite understood this approach to scheduling classes, and it was a great relief, when I took off for another college, to be able to simply drop a class if I didn't like it. (It's equally hard to switch roommates, but at least you can avoid your roommate more easily than you can avoid a class.) No doubt some people may pick on this as putting a small problem up front, but to me it's emblematic of a lot of things: at St. John's, you don't simply enter a college, you enter a kind of tradition in which things have _always_ been done a certain way, and you roll with it, or else. This gave me some of my most rewarding experiences at the school: reading Aristotle's "Politics," which I would never have done on my own; working through Newton's "Principia," ditto; Plato's "Republic" -- all of which remain on my list of favorite books years after I first encountered them. You give up a certain freedom, you give up a not insignificant amount of autonomy, and you encounter the Books. This is a rather heretical view, but I think of the seminars and tutorials -- enjoyable and illuminating as most of them were -- mainly as excuses to read books I never otherwise would have read. You swim in books, sometimes you nearly drown in books (someone once told me that the average St. John's semester was equal to about twenty-four credit hours at a "normal" college). You will not, however, write many papers about the books. In the three years I went there, I wrote two papers a year for seminar (that's one a semester; and I was different from most people in that I chose to write two different papers, rather than a draft of my final paper and the final paper itself) and the paper requirements for tutorial varied widely. One of the best experiences I had at the college was during my first graduate preceptorial where the tutor announced we would write a short paper every other week (we were going through the "Republic" book by book). The semester after that, another tutor required a paper a week on Aristotle. One tutorial -- that's one-- during my undergraduate years required the same kind of discipline. I think if there was more writing at St. John's, there would be less bullshitting, and people would have a better chance to really think about and absorb a lot of the central ideas in the Program. But in this opinion I have apparently always been a minority, since whenever I bring up the idea people have been horrified or dismissive. Many, many aspects of the Program and the College are almost two-faced - -- there's a lit-up side and a shadow side -- as there are to most things in life, I suppose. You will go through the "Iliad" at exactly the same pace as all the other freshman; you will become very, very well-acquainted with the other members of your class; you will have a peer group which will go through more experiences with you than you may have thought possible. Sometimes this is extraordinarily unifying and gratifying. Other times, you may think lovingly of murdering every single one of your classmates in varied and detailed fashion. Two Johnnies anywhere else in the world other than the College, no matter what class they are from or how different they may be, have an instant and unmistakeable Bond. You will never have another experience in your life like St. John's. Sometimes you will be relieved, sometimes saddened, by this. Because the school is so small and the classes are so small and the majority of undergraduate students still live on campus, it is very, very difficult to get any private time. It's easier to get this in Santa Fe than Annapolis, because in Santa Fe you can hike off into the mountains. If you don't like to hike, you probably will not like Santa Fe. There is a muted, half-humorous, half-serious rivalry between the two campuses which has a lot to do with the ever-present clash between East and West. There are a lot of cliques. This gets particularly bad in February, when the weather on both campuses is nasty and there's no way to get away. In my day very few of the students had televisions or VCRs (this may have changed a bit). I didn't have the time to read outside books, do my writing, take an art class which met once a week, regularly read a paper or keep up with magazines. When the Berlin Wall fell, I didn't know until my seminar tutor told me about it. When Desert Storm broke, we went ahead and had seminar anyway -- a friend of mine was telling me missiles were headed toward Israel and the tutor said, "Let's get started, shall we?" During our graduate section on Politics we had "special" tutorials and seminars on the Fourth of July. Very little stops the Program except some of the offical let-the-students-run-wild randomly picked days like Senior Prank. When you do the Program, all you do is the Program. It's a bit like an intellectual boot camp which lasts for four years, except it's fun and can be exhilarating. It's also like a glacier of print rolling over you -- you may be flattened. I always felt, and s did most of the people around me, that I was behind. You can always do better, you can always do more; you're facing the Western canon and there's no way to adequately deal with it in four years. If you have an all-consuming interest which you think you might major in if you went to another school -- writing, math, playing a musical instrument, etc. -- you may be very frustrated as a Johnny. Another aspect which is not spoken of frequently in the literature: SJC is often not regarded as a good place to prepare for a career in mathematics, science, etc. When I transferred to a English department in another college I spent an hour explaining my transcript to my advisor (though I wound up with a lot of credits). In my opinion, you get a wonderful background in the history and philosophy of science and wind up really understanding the philosophic method, but a friend of mine who wanted to be a mathematician received a letter from Berkeley -- to which he'd applied -- at the finish of his senior year, which concluded: "I am afraid if you want to be a professional mathematician, your undergraduate education has been a waste of four years of your time." He got into another graduate school and went on to teach mathematics, but he was shattered for quite a while. It is an excellent educational experience for a writer. Many, many graduates go on to become lawyers; I have no idea why, except perhaps for the fact that at St. John's you learn to both 1) argue well and 2) be able to bullshit your way out of nearly everything. If you are interested in Derrida, Foucault, postmodernism, deconstruction, etc., This Is Not The Place For You. If you know a lot about, say, the Federalist papers, and decide to share your background knowledge with your class during the reading of the Constitution, you may be shut up rather quickly. The College most often works on a kind of New Criticism approach -- that is to say, considering _only_ the words on the page and what they mean and ignoring most historical/personal/cultural context -- with all of the good and bad that implies: You get deep inside the text. You also get lost very quickly in such things as the _very_ political passages of Dante (my sophomore seminar had a long, humorless discussion on whether or not you should Read The Notes if you didn't get a reference in Dante. It was decided a quick peek was OK). You will read almost no "secondary sources" -- criticism, interpretation, etc. This can be wonderful (encountering "Don Quixote" or "Huckleberry Finn" without the customary baggage of the critical opinion of the past hundred years). This can be awful (encountering the junior-year manual on electricity and electromagnetism, which would have been slightly more intelligible if it had been written in cuneiform). If you are interested in studying _primarily_ math, science, or English literature, you will be disappointed -- the Program is more like a smorgasboard, where you get exposed to all kinds of things -- very quickly -- you might not have heard of otherwise. If the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing, St. John's has nailed its colors to the mast as a den of foxes (pun mildly intended); specialization is often frowned on, implicitly or explicitly. If you're an English major, you will spend torturous amounts of time on science and math. If you're a science major, you will spend tortuorous amounts of time on books such as "Middlemarch" and "Theatetus." The College forces you to read books and do things you might never otherwise do -- and often that's a wonderfully expanding experience -- it boosts your self-confidence wonderfully. That is, if it works. Some people crash like a teacup and don't come back; others (like me) crash and burn during geometry only to learn they really like calculus and number theory. Many people will tell you working through Euclid, book by book, proposition by proposition, was an incredible experience, like somehow walking through a Bach fugue or a concerto by Mozart -- incredible harmony, incredible precision. That ecstatic experience requires a hell of a lot of hard work, discipline, and sheer slogging. By now you will probably be impatiently asking, Well, what's _good_ about the school? Why did you go, and why did you go back, and why should I go? Well, many of the things I outlined above as problems are also immense advantages. It's a dialectical experience that way. You don't have any time to read magazines, newspapers, etc., to get sucked up in the headline-a-minute atmosphere of the modern world, because you're learning about the intellectual and cultural history of the human race, and "There is nothing new under the sun" becomes not a disheartning but a wonderful idea -- you will experience the continuity of the Western tradition. Your first year, you will, like all freshmen, beome an honorary Greek citizen; the freshman year has more continuity and is more integrated than the rest of the Program, and it's often the high point of most people's experience. You will discover a capacity to do that which you've always told yourself you could never do -- demonstrate a Euclidean geometric proof on the blackboard, in front of a class; or analyze a Shakespearean sonnet in frot of another class. You won't translate the "Iliad" as well as a second-year Greek major would; but you will think about the problems of translation, and what translation does to language and to works of art. You get to see, so to speak, the riggings and lighting system behind what is often a smooth facade in other schools -- at St. John's you will consider elemental questions (ask "What is truth?" and it's not considered a jest) and easy answers are frowned upon. In fact, sometimes answers of any kind are frowned upon. My friends and I groaned when, in freshman year, we saw what we considered an unbearably corny piece of PR: a pamphlet entitled, "You've Encountered the Answers....Now, Are You Ready for the Questions?" But it's true. Many people speak of being shaken up, rattled, turned upside-down by the end of their freshman and sophomore years -- I know it was true of me. A favorite saying of the PR office often is, "St. John's teaches you how to think." I think this is bogus -- no one can teach you to think except yourself. What St. John's often teaches people is how to think _rigorously._ You have to back up your points with examples from the text; you have to argue your point quickly and intelligibly with twenty other excited, articulate, intelligent other people; you have to be able to listen to them, communicate with them, and argue with them at top speed; and you have to be able to understand material as disparate as "Gulliver's Travels" and "The New Organon." You don't just read the assigned book; tutors encourage you to read it twice even three times, and they're right. There's no way you can read everything as many times and with the understanding you need to, but they're right. Although at first your autonomy seems to be taken away -- read this, room with that person, go to this class -- no one messes with the independence of your mind: there isn't any party line to follow -- in fact, people who have strong preconceptions about a certain topic are often quickly disabused of their certainty -- there's no one telling you _what_ to think. You get to have a certain familiarity with the books -- especially with the texts of freshman year: Euclid, the "Iliad," some of the Greek tragedies, Aristotle, Plato -- which is almost like being able to walk around in them. Sometimes St. John's resembles a meditation exercise: you read, and you read, and you read until you can't see, and then you read a little more; you consider why Abraham would sacrifice Isaac, and you discuss, and you consider, and you think about it until you never want to think about it again, and then you see it from a different angle. There's a certain expansion of the soul which comes from reading Augustine's "Confessions" and truckloads of Kant and translating Racine and struggling through Aristotle's "De Anima" all in four years. You're immersed in ideas; they start to become nearly tangible things. There's a certain exercise in freshman lab we used to do at St. John's in Santa Fe (I don't think it's ever been done in Annapolis): it teaches you about observation, and seeing, and assumptions. Your mission -- and there's no choice about accepting it -- is to go out behind the lab building, pick a square foot of dirt/rock/weeds etc., and observe it for the entire lab period -- three hours or so. At first, groans, boredom, stifled giggles, whispering. You're to write down everything you see in a notebook. You run out of things to write down quickly. You look at your watch. Not even half-an-hour's gone by yet. This is boring and pointless. But after an hour, you start to _see_ things. You start to truly notice, and appreciate. To make a long story short at the end of the three hours we all chorused that we wished we could stay ot there all day to observe a square foot of dirt/rock/weeds etc. This exercise has summed up St. John's for me for a while: you're on your own, no one is telling you what to see, at first it's frustrating and pointless, and, by the end, the more you put into it, the more you get out. But if you told someone that you had fun looking at a patch of dirt for three hours -- well, no one would _really_ understand what you meant except someone who had gone through the same experience. In short, if you have decided to go to St. John's by this point, I envy you, and I feel like saying a prayer for you -- and it'll be a helluva ride. *** The short version: > Do you think it's all it's cracked up to be? Well, yes and no -- no one ever told me about the worst aspects, but no one was able to really put the best parts into words, either. It's an extraordinary experience, and the catalogue doesn't let you in on one/tenth of it. Would I do it again? Yes. Would I be crazy to do so? Yes. >Do you think that the >St. John's program offers any serious > benefits which standard curriculums do not? Are those serious benefits > accompanied by equally serious problems? You betcha. But then again, that's true of life, too....You have to decide whether or not you want to go to the College, whether or not it fits your priorities and dreams, and no one else can really make that decision for you. I can try, haltingly, to let you in on a little bit of my experience, to let you perhaps have a window on what some of it is like. From then on, you make up your own mind. Moira Russell SF U '92 SFGI '98