If you were to imagine an ideal year of humanities education, it might include:
- Immersion in Greek or Latin, bolstered by many weeks in Greece or Rome;
- Coursework in philosophy, literature, and political theory, all the readings counting as canonical works;
- Small classes taught by experienced and charismatic instructors in a Socratic seminar style;
- And, finally, a small community of peers who share a similar interest in reading and discussing monuments of Western Civilization.
All of that is happening right now in Savannah, Georgia, at Ralston College, where I play an advisory role. Courses cover everything you’d expect from a traditional humanities formation to classics and masterpieces in the Western heritage—no contemporary works of cultural relevance.
The website lists Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Bruegel and Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. The philosophy seminar declares itself an exercise in “slow-reading,” and during three days I spent in Savannah last month lecturing to, dining with, and listening to the attendees, a repeat of visits in 2024 and 2023—see here for an account—I saw no screens in front of students’ faces in classes at any time.
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This time, I taught a seminar on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and delivered an evening lecture on Hegel, Nietzsche, and 20th-century nihilism and relativism. Another lecturer the night before talked about Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the so-called Donation of Constantine, and Plato’s disquisition on writing in the Phaedrus. None of what we said went over the audience’s head. These were young people well-accustomed to texts of high diction and dense argument.
It’s an intimate gathering in Savannah, where 35 students study and travel together all year long.
They’ve survived a rigorous screening process that started with more than 1,000 inquiries from prospective applicants. It’s obvious that the preceding seven months have brought them happily into a genuine fellowship, a common experience. They come from all over the country, a few from foreign lands, but they relate to one another with a familiarity and ease that comes from undergoing intense training together. At one dinner, in fact, I heard of a remarkable outcome: four couples had formed during the year among the group, all of them speaking frankly and optimistically of marriage and children. Given what we hear about Gen Z shunning matrimony and fearing parenthood, we might ascribe the commitments in part, perhaps, to the content of what they’ve been exposed to all year long.
As for the travel, founder Stephen Blackwood described to me how students spent much of the Fall season. The one-year program has four two-month terms, the first of which is spent entirely in Greece. After a few weeks of language-learning boot camp, the group flew across the ocean to study the ancient sites and encounter them directly, guided by tutors just as young English noblemen did in the 18th century on their Grand Tour. Ralston students spent the first month on the island of Samos, where they entered the cave where Pythagoras lived and worked. A side trip to Patmos took place, where students laid hands in the nook where St. John prayed and wrote. The second month was centered in Nafplio because of its nearness to Olympia, Mycenae, and Epidaurus, home of a historic theater and sanctuary. (For more on the Greek program, see here.)
In an informal conversation, I asked each student why they had come to Ralston for a year of Western Civilization and old books. Not one of them said, “I wanted a free trip to the Mediterranean.” In fact, no one mentioned the Greek tour at all.
What they did mention—almost unanimously—was something deeper: a hunger for real education. One student, a Columbia math graduate, confessed she felt she had “missed out on being educated” and came to Ralston “to continue learning.” A computer science major from MIT said that after completing her degree, she realized “some really important part of my soul was missing.” Ralston allowed her to learn ancient Greek and read the New Testament in its original language.
Others echoed this longing. A classical trumpet player who had studied literature and philosophy at the University of Georgia found his previous coursework frustratingly narrow, focused more on contemporary social concerns than the enduring questions. A math major from Georgia Tech described his education as overly technical and utilitarian—he wanted to explore the “foundations.” A Princeton graduate in classics and psychology said he was “sick of the destructive” ways the humanities often approach the classics; Ralston, he believed, was the antidote. (He cited Victor Davis Hanson’s Who Killed Homer? with admiration.) A student from Utah Valley University said that the “hoop-jumping” of college had nearly extinguished his “love of learning”—Ralston rekindled it.
A handful of students came from institutions with strong classical programs—Hillsdale, the University of Dallas, Thomas Aquinas College—but they, too, came to go further.
That was it. They are youths with a thirst for humanities. If they got it as undergrads, they wanted more of it at Ralston. If, more commonly, they didn’t get it as undergrads, even though they attended some of the most elite universities in the nation, the thirst remained; they didn’t give up; it had to be met.
One final thing: more than half of the students expressed a parallel desire, not for Great Books, but for others with the same thirst. They spoke of “community,” of finding people like themselves, with similar loves and passions. Clearly, in the past, they’d been isolated by their tastes. The expected college to provide an intellectual social life, not just learning, and it didn’t. I mentioned to them at the end the etymology of the word college (“read together”), and they nodded and smiled.
Image by Ralston College
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
