Program
Mission
What is slow reading?
Slow reading: when we were in school, being a “slow reader” meant remedial reading: it was what the “slow” kids did, and was stigmatized as a bad thing. Slow readers struggled, labored under learning disabilities, were behind in their schooling, or had lower I.Q.s than their classmates. Being a fast reader was praised: if you could read quickly and grasp the content correctly, you were rewarded with high praise, good grades, and lavished with attention and affection.
The problem arises with a certain kind of book we do not read in schools at all anymore, or – if in rare cases they are encountered – at least not in a sustained way: the great books, beginning with Homer. These books, the greatest ones, are built for savoring, for rich, slow lifelong study, not for speed-reading on the technocratic superhighway to literacy.
Thus, the “values” we were trained in at an early age to accept around reading – that is, that faster is smarter and better, and slower is worse and stupid – do not at all meet the needs of the greatest kind of reading of all, the lifelong reading of the great books. Our values in this respect fail and even impoverish us.
A solution
The majority of Americans who identify as readers say they have no time to read regularly. A significant portion of us also say that, given the time, we lack the energy, the drive, to read after an exhausting work day.
“Slow reading” is the name we give to an effective and simple solution to the two-fold problem of time and energy: read great books together slowly, covering sections no more than what you can read out loud together, each week, and then converse.
To unpack this a little more, the solution has several interrelated parts:
How we solve the problem of energy and motivation
1. Take a high-stakes book that has a higher than normal share of common interest. The book must of a sufficient quality and beauty to serve the interests of promoting understanding, reflection, knowledge and even inspiration. We believe reading at its best is not even about reading, but learning.
2. Read the book together, instead of alone. We have a cultural habit of regarding reading as primarily a solitary thing. We reverse this: reading is a community effort. The books we choose are the sort that are difficult to tackle alone. They simply call out to be shared. And like an exercise class, reading together with others provides motivation.
If you lack energy or motivation, the nature of the book itself and the group effort packs a lot of energy.
How we solve the problem of time
3. We read short selections each week. Instead of massive readings between each session, like an academic program, we slow down and take on short selections. Thus, we begin our sessions reading out loud for 10 minutes.
4. We meet weekly, for as long as it takes. We typically take 24 to 36 meetings. We are not in a terminal degree program, so there is no rush. We meet for about an hour each week, once a week, is a lot like going to the gym. Reading are short enough that you can catch up if you miss.
5. Reading together means not only reading the words from the page, but also – and even more importantly – reading conversationally. That is, in our shared effort to read or see what the author is saying, we converse. We raise questions of the text and of each other. Dialectic, to use the ancient word, stirs up and stimulates our whole mind and heart like nothing else can.
So if your bucket list of great books is untouched because you feel ‘brain dead’ after work, or you find you don’t have a lot of free time, slow reading with us can help you move forward with your learning aspirations. Read our Frequently Asked Questions here
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.
The heart of liberal education: lifelong learning and the need for community
At the heart of our education – after much experimentation and alteration during the past century – still lives the dream of a genuine liberal education. Education, we still believe, is needful for a better life, or even the best life. We still feel that education can save us.
Of late, we have interpreted this primary belief to mean that education should assist us in the attainment of material conditions for our happiness (e.g. career paths). But a genuine liberal education – in its original expression – aims not for the attainment of material conditions, but rather points the way to a certain kind of life shaped by a lifelong love of learning.
A lifelong love of learning is aspirational in character: beyond the acquisition of skills, this passion sets out in pursuit of the highest or most complete form knowledge, that is, a reflective understanding of the timeless – and timely – fundamental questions. Reflective understanding grows or develops and indeed is practiced necessarily over a whole life. That is to say, fundamental knowledge through reflective understanding is not something you “get” in a semester, a year or a four year program.
Liberally educated human beings thus acquire a lifelong love of learning that will carry them far beyond the attainment of a particular degree, far beyond the discrete tasks and terminal programs of formal schooling.
Without opportunities to initiate or sustain the continued pursuit of serious lifelong learning outside terminal programs, when formal schooling ends, the project of liberal education fails, no matter how well-funded or well-designed our schools and colleges are. For the pursuit of learning is not a matter of reading books in solitude, but is at its best a shared pursuit, which means learning requires some sort of community in order for it to flourish.
If we want to revitalize our school and college communities, looking to support meaningful communities of learning outside schooling could be the surest path to the end of fostering liberal education.
Symposium Great Books Institute was built with an eye to fulfilling the very heart of genuine liberal education, by helping individuals discover and pursue their lifelong aspiration – long after schooling has terminated – and in the context of a meaningful community of learning.
We see individuals and communities, joining together in the friendship of a shared pursuit, who can do so much more than they ever dreamed possible. 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.
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.”
