Academic Life

Sequence of Readings

The sequences of readings in the tutorials are designed to assist the students the cultivate the art of open dialogue. Also, they are employed to help unmask opinions, then later, to encourage the discovery of the connectedness of things, and finally, to animate in the students an ardent desire to live life well. 

The sequences of readings are arranged in such a way that they magnify greatly the depth of each particular reading. For instance, one sequence could be arranged in a chronological order because each work was written after or in light of the previous author or authors. One example of this kind of sequence is the philosophical writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel. 

Yet another sequence could be called upon to introduce major thinkers.  For example, Camus’ Stranger and Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand, and Stars may be used to introduce a sequence of readings on man’s place in the world, such as Freud’s Future of an Illusion and Augustine’s Confessions. The juxtaposition of a modern and of a classical or Christian thinker facilitates the separating of the historical and the cultural from first principles and fundamental relationships. 

In other cases, a sequence could aim for comprehensiveness within a particular theme: Plato, Saint John, William Shakespeare, and Victor Frankl could be called upon to speak on the subject of love. In such a masterful dialogue, the students listen to some of the most powerful arguments possible. The open dialogue in the tutorial permits the students, on their own, to draw conclusions that are based upon the evidence presented to them both by the masters and by their fellow learners.

Finally, a particular reading may occur in several different sequences. For instance, Euclid may be called to engage in dialogues with thinkers as Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kant, Newton, or Einstein.

The sequences of readings in the Program of Studies are integrated into a year-by-year order of readings called the annual tutorials.  Within each annual tutorial, the sequences of readings build upon the previous ones—in a gradual way. At the end of their undergraduate liberal education in the Program of Studies, the students should be able to see the integration that exists in the world and within themselves and, thereby, they should be convinced that engagement with the world and communion with God are necessary if they desire to truly live life well. In this way, the students are encouraged to continue in their own growth and development for the rest of their lives.

The sequences of readings are designed so that the students will discover the first principles that are found in the world, such as the whole is prior to and greater than any one of its parts; all men desire to know; and every human action aims at the final good of happiness. Thus, all of the tutorials are integrated on the basis of first principles, since the world itself is integrated in this way. For example, the biologist knows that the organs of an animal are not understood without the whole animal, nor the cell without the organ, nor the membranes and macromolecules without the cell.  In imitation of nature, then, all of the annual tutorials are integrated on the basis of parts that can be referred to a whole.

At this point, it should be noted that the present-day academic disciplines in undergraduate liberal education are historical artifacts. These artificial structures neither penetrate the universe of first principles nor exhaust the totality of fundamental relationships. The current way of dividing human learning and, therefore, the world into curricular departments reinforces in the students the cultural perception that reality is disconnected and that human experience is both individualistic and autonomous. Nobelist Richard Feynman explains why this is the case.

When he taught color vision in introductory physics at the California Institute of Technology, Feynman remarked, “There are many interesting phenomena associated with vision which involve a mixture of physical phenomena and physiological processes, and the full appreciation of natural phenomena, as we see them, must go beyond physics in the usual sense. We make no apologies for making these excursions into other fields, because the separation of fields, as we have emphasized, is merely a human convenience, and an unnatural thing. Nature is not interested in our separations, and many of the interesting phenomena bridge the gaps between fields. 

In agreement with Feynman’s position, the Program of Studies does not enforce the sequences of readings into discrete departmental containers and, as a result, the focus of the students is not artificially narrowed. In other words, the fundamental relationships that exist in the world and that are discovered by grasping first principles are available to the students.

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