Program
Mission
What are great books?
Before we speak about slow reading, we need first say something about the “great books” – what are they? 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’, 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.
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.
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 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.
What is ‘slow reading’?
“Great books” is really an aspirational idea – regarding a whole approach to learning and what’s possible for learning – that grew out of the North American Socratic movement nearly a century ago. Colleges, secondary schooling programs and postgraduate learning communities arose over the past century in various parts of North America, such that now it is not very difficult to find folks practicing the ‘great books’ approach in all major cities across the US and Canada.
The North American practice of reading Great Books – whether in colleges or outside the academy in adult communities – places special emphasis on conversation, typically called the seminar.
The practical reason for the conversational approach is fairly simple: a participant in a conversation stands to benefit so much more from being active in a conversation, meeting the material according to their own questions, as opposed to sitting passively and listening to a lecture. The superiority of engaged, active, thoughtful learning over passive consumption of information is something everyone can experience for themselves.
For the past century, the common practice of various great books communities has been to read one great book or several smaller books (like plays) in a relatively short period of time – over the span of relatively few seminars.
“Slow reading” here at Symposium grew out of our dissatisfaction with this standard practice. Seminar conversations of this kind can be unsatisfying or even frustrating on several levels for participants or students. After so many conversations – even in colleges – that barely touch the surface of a text, or speak vaguely, we decided to slow our pace down and spend more time on fewer pages, over a longer duration. Instead of 4 or 6 seminars, we stretch out to 12, 24, 36, or even 48 weekly seminars, depending on the length of the book and the decision of the members.
Our thought is: 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.
The great books were written with care and were built to last – to be read and reread over a lifetime. They deserve this level of attention and care from us, their readers.
After the time you spend reading a book with us is over, you will have read that great book with more thoroughness and depth than in any other setting.
You’ll have a better idea and deeper appreciation of what the author is really up to than in any other way – which is important for these old books, since it is hard to see them truly, unclouded by our own prejudices.
This experience 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.
Everything is to be gained from slowing down and reading the great books as they were meant to be read.
We feel that it is possible, or even likely, that the net result of engaging in a 10 year reading program of the Great Books, according to the standard approach, is to develop a wrong idea – or at least a very shadowy or vague idea – about what the books are about, simply because the books were read so quickly and discussed so generally.
To avoid this kind of error, we adopted a more workmanlike approach to the great books here at Symposium.
Consequently, we can say with confidence that our conversations stand to be far better than the standard approach, even in colleges, because we take our time actually working on developing an understanding of the book itself.
“School” has its origins in the Greek word “skhole”, which means leisure. We are taking back the true meaning of school in our workmanlike approach to the reading of the great books.
One of the most surprising and delightful discoveries is that slow reading – because it involves greater concentration on shorter readings – relieves the burden of heavy reading assignments endemic to academic programs. This is a better use of time, and is smarter reading.
Finally, the majority of Americans who identify as readers say they lack the energy, the drive, to read after an exhausting work day. Slow reading, because it is smarter reading, gives you back that energy through reading together in conversation. It’s really that simple. Conversation, as one ancient author says, holds secrets like ‘love and liquor’ – it stimulates and even intoxicates, or inspires, a desire for knowledge and learning. Instead of reading alone, reading together is inspiring and motivating.
Interested in learning more about our courses, or “pathways” of reading? Click here to learn more!
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.”
