Program
History
Mission
“Love is the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
—Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium
Schools end, programs conclude, and there is never enough time. The questions that matter are: what is next for learning? How to sustain the flame and carry it forward?
We do not subscribe to the “trickle down” theory of learning, that holds that lifelong learners be thrown remainders and drippings of learning from the stored honey of the academy and its terminal degree programs. This vision of lifelong learning takes the power and capacity for real long-term growth out of the hands of the learner.
Instead, we think what is needed is to make our own honey, to find a genuine and workable alternative to the academic model exactly suited to the demands of a lifelong pursuit. We see individuals, joining together in the friendship of a shared pursuit, who can do so much more than they ever dreamed possible – more than listening passively to lectures, more even than taking a smattering of 4 week great books courses in slipshod style. We see individuals undertaking serious, sustained and deeply pleasurable efforts of learning over the span of a whole life, in proportion to their own native powers and passions, and in the context of growing communities dedicated to the needs of lifelong learning.
History
Symposium’s approach to books and discussion is rooted in an alternative education movement which started a century ago. The movement developed as a practice of Socratic conversation based on the primary texts of Western civilization. While Symposium Great Books Institute is not affiliated with the Chicago Great Books Foundation, Symposium GBI shares the vision of liberal learning started at University of Chicago, Columbia College, St. John’s College.
Adult education has always been at the roots of the great books movement. Figures such as Scott Buchanan, Alexander Meiklejohn, Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins, Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss were each involved in significant efforts to create seminars for adults – from the People’s Institute in 1920s New York City, to the School for Social Studies in depression era San Francisco, and later at the University of Chicago. Seminars on the great books at these institutions brought together people from all walks of life and all professions.
Symposium Great Books Institute was originally founded in San Francisco between 2006 and 2010 by two enterprising young women, Roxana Zirakzadeh and Briana Henderson Saussy. Roxana and Briana, graduates of St. John’s College in Santa Fe and Annapolis, had a dream to take the one thing of great integrity that they had received at St. John’s College, and offer it to adults of all walks of life in a setting that would be available to people like the working mom and busy professional.
Symposium GBI San Francisco was located on Hayes St. in Hayes Valley, one block away from Symphony Hall, and operated out of a lovely boutique bookstore. Classes were offered every day of the week in the back area of the store, to a growing and beloved community of adult learners. San Francisco operations were closed, primarily for life changes, not for lack of interest and support. Symposium was then reorganized under nonprofit status in San Antonio, Texas in 2013. In addition to currently holding traditional seminar classes in San Antonio, and working collaboratively with the San Antonio Museum of Art, Symposium Great Books Institute subsequently launched an online component of its work, joining voices across the nation and the world.
Symposium in San Antonio and pangeographically holds to the same root vision of lifelong learning started in Hayes Valley in 2006.
Since that time, Symposium has departed from the traditional 2 hour seminar model based on lengthy reading selections (which is more suited to academic programs) and offers now close/slow and intensive reading seminars to meet the needs of serious lifelong readers. Past slow reading pathways include Plato’s Shorter Socratic Dialogues, and the “Education Quartet” – Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rousseau’s Emile and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Mission
The mission of Symposium Great Books Institute is to provide the highest quality lifetime liberal learning opportunities for people of all walks of life and ages, by supporting a community of learning dedicated to this end. Symposium holds rigorous Socratic seminars (liberal or free discussion with a serious purpose) based on primary or original texts from around the world. The quality texts we curate form the common ground and unifying principle of conversations among participants of varying backgrounds.
By following this approach, our commitment is to reframe in helpful ways the most conventional beliefs about the learning activity. We want to help individuals discover pathways of serious lifelong learning, not measured by the standard of academic degree granting programs (from early education to advanced degrees) or extension courses, nor by the marketplace, but by the standard of a fulfilled human life. Our conviction is that there is a genuine pathway for a life of learning that is rigorous, yet integrated with a whole life – with work in the world and family life – outside the walls of academe.
Donate to Symposium Great Books Institute
Symposium Great Books Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to bringing to our communities the highest quality lifetime learning opportunities for people of all walks of life. Donations help to support our teachers and staff, and the development of unique new programs.
I’ve really enjoyed and felt enlightened by these seminars. It’s rarely easy to get a group of your friends together to discuss anything of consequence in a focused way, but Symposium completely solves that problem. Not only that, but it provides the impetus to learn about some of the classics I might have never made time for on my own.
“Symposium is different. It’s not a book club where you read the latest bestseller, sip wine, gossip, and do everything but talk about the book. And it’s not an academic seminar either – where a rumpled, aging professor in an ill-fitting corduroy blazer lectures on why a great book is sacrosanct. Instead, Symposium gives you – the average reader – an opportunity to tussle, engage, and struggle with understanding, the big ideas of life. Symposium participants are not expected to have any advanced knowledge about a text or to even have any idea who the author is. Many times, I have fundamentally misunderstood a text or read a passage incorrectly, but during (and after) the discussions, I have come away with a better understanding of the text through the thoughtful comments of others. Symposium will force you to engage authors and to tackle ideas that are so easily glanced over.”
