What is slow reading?

Our Mission Statement

The mission of Symposium Great Books Institute is to build and sustain communities of lifelong learners engaged in liberal education through the slow reading of the great books. 

Symposium holds rigorous Socratic seminars (liberal or free discussion with a serious purpose) based on primary or original works from around the world. These are among the greatest works of the human mind and imagination, whether words, musical notes, numbers and figures, or works of fine art.  The quality works 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 liberation of human mind

Over a century ago, Charles Eliot at Harvard University introduced the elective system to America, in order to meet the great demands flowing from new successes in science and industry, and the concomitant need to train not only specialists, but what we now call a workforce. After many generations, the effects of Eliot’s new program are nearly ingrained in our unexamined belief that education is a “pre-earning-a-living” and pre-professional sort of activity. 

Whereas the original conception of liberal arts included the study of mathematics, and was a well-balanced set of studies, liberal arts education is now emptied of meaning, even though the name lives on as a ghostly reminder and a sort of catch-all phrase – standing for any and all studies outside science and mathematics.   

A genuine liberal education -an education that both helps free the mind from unexamined prejudice and is also befitting of free human beings  – aims not simply for the securing 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, and its love aims for the whole realm of human learning. It aims for truth, and as Parmenides said, truth is well-rounded.

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 terminal degree program.  

There are several excellent colleges that offer alternatives to mainstream education, and have taken significant strides in restoring the meaning of liberal education. But these terminal programs can only offer a beginning for what must of necessity be a lifelong pursuit. For the books we read are built for a whole lifetime of learning and a life that grows and fructifies in conversation with them. 

Without opportunities to either initiate or sustain the continued pursuit of serious lifelong learning outside terminal programs, when formal schooling ends, it stand to reason that the project of liberal education is incomplete – or even fails – no matter how well-funded or well-designed our schools and colleges are. 

The pursuit of learning is not a matter of reading books in solitude, nor is it a one-and-done affair, but is a shared pursuit, which means learning requires a community dedicated to the ends of lifelong learning 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 a culture  liberal education. 

Reading Great Books, Slowly

There may be many ways to revitalize our liberal learning, but we know of no finer way to do it than to read the greatest books.

Great books are the ‘best that is thought and said’, those seminal works of human thought and imagination that span poetry, philosophy, history, science and mathematics, and even music – from Homer to Jane Austen, Bach and Beethoven; from Plato and Euclid to Lobachevsky and Nietzsche – and perhaps beyond.   

The books – which explode the categories of academic specialization – are not the repository of ‘great ideas’, or sacred cows, so much as they are masterfully conceived attempts to push thinking to the heights and depths of one or more of the fundamental questions of greatest importance to human beings. Even though these books constitute the nerve centers of abiding disputes down the ages, we hold the possibility that one of them could have the definitive answer to one or more of the fundamental questions.   

Against the prejudice of the age, we believe the books should not be left to specialists, but are the birthright of all human beings everywhere aspiring to a life of freedom, learning, wisdom and higher purpose.

We claim this birthright as our own, and we read books thoughtfully, and we read with aspiration, that by living a life of learning, a certain good flows into our lives and communities that lifts us up. 

Reading just one of these books, with sufficient seriousness, can help us raise the level our own questioning, and set our minds in a direction that leads ultimately to a better life.

The careful reading of these books can be a liberation. Jettisoning preconceptions, and setting aside the urgent concerns of the day, being freed from the weight of present-mindedness and its attendant anxieties, one can enter imaginatively into very different ways of thinking and open up to new possibilities – and in turn, from this new vantage, the present is illuminated in fresh light. Alternative conceptions and possibilities open for us, that would otherwise be closed.  

The great books were written with patient care  and were built to last – unlike so much from our throw-away consumer culture. The books were made to be read and reread over a lifetime. They deserve this level of attention and care from us, their readers. 

We – who are freed from the race of the academic calendar – have the ability and the desire to slow down, and commit ourselves with care and craftsmanship to the art of reading well. 

After all, what’s the hurry?

One author (dear to the American founders), Montesquieu, in his preface to the “Spirit of Laws”, asks the reader to judge his work carefully, in light of the years he spent working out his reflections on the fundamental political  questions: 

“I ask a favor that I fear will not be granted; it is that one not judge by a moment’s reading the work of twenty years, that one approve or condemn the book as a whole and not some few sentences, Of one wants to seek the design of the author, one can fund it only in the design of the work.”

Montesquieu’s word gets at the heart of what we’re trying to do here at Symposium.

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 envision individuals and communities, joining together in the friendship of a shared pursuit, who can do so much more than they ever dreamed possible.  

…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.

In other words, we envision a growing cohort of adult learners ordered nothing less than to the liberation of the human mind. 

Our 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.