Academic Life

Pedagogy

Since living life well presupposes a personal investigation of the principles that integrate created existence, the students must learn how to discover and examine these principles. 

They can learn to do this if they possess childlike docility.  For instance, just as a child learns to speak by listening to people speak, the students learn to inquire, reason, assess opinions, and grasp indemonstrable truths by participating with their fellow learners in open dialogues with the masters of orderly thought—the persons who seem to have elevated the life of spirit to its highest level and who appear to have lived the interior life of spirit to the full. 

The Program of Studies accomplishes its educational mission and attains its academic objectives by having the students participate in certain sequences of readings that are directed by the Socratic method of open dialogue.

The academic program at Magdalen College is rooted in the classical and Christian views of liberal education. The life of Socrates, the philosophy of Plato, and the establishment of the Academy form its historical foundation. With the dictum "the unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates set forth the mission of liberal education—to live life well.

Classes at the College, known as tutorials, are conducted in the Socratic method of open dialogue. Teachers, called tutors, help each student to pursue wisdom and to experience that truth is objective, knowledge is trustworthy, and learning is common to all.

The authors that are read in the four-year Program are the masters of orderly thought, both ancient and modern, in the various fields of knowledge such as philosophy, mathematics, science, language, the social sciences, and catechesis.

The Program of Studies aims to awaken in students a desire to live a life of truth, goodness, and beauty by helping them discover their nature as integrated human beings, their place in the world, and their relationship with God.

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