By Travis Skabo, Admissions Student Worker

Every Friday during lunch, several St. John’s students gather in a small room just off the main dining hall for a lunchtime conversation with Dean Davis. These conversations are always based off a section of a text that is being read in class that week, or a short text on liberal education itself. On January 26th, the conversation centered around a the “Statement on Educational Policy and Program of St. John’s College.” This short document was drafted by former dean Jacob Klein in 1950 as a supplement to the statement of the program intended to help the faculty understand their role in this liberal education.

Dean Davis began our conversation by asking about what Klein calls “continuity of learning.” How are we to understand our curriculum? Is everything tied together? Klein says no, the problem of the different perspectives of the program cannot “be solved by what is called ‘integration,’ if this term is understood to refer to some alleged or arbitrary unity to be found in those divergent subject matters.” Then what are we to do when we are faced with disparate ways of viewing the world and no clear way to unite them?

From here, the conversation commenced. We first discussed the differences presented by the astronomers, the progression from Ptolemy’s geocentric circular orbits to Newton’s force-based elliptical account. These two authors hold irreconcilable views, and yet we study both with equal seriousness. The consensus we began to reach is that it is not so much what these people thought, but why they thought it that matters to us. In transporting one’s mind into the mind of an author, liberal arts students become acutely aware of their own biases, and reexamine their own mode of thinking. As Klein says, “If the instruction can produce within the learners this fertile tension between the exploration of the material and the understanding of the intellectual operations involved in this activity, then, and only then do we teach the liberal arts.”

Of course, this discussion was a bit strange. We were using our method, the seminar discussion, to evaluate our method. And yet, that reveals the beauty of St. John’s. Here, we not only take our learning seriously enough to try to understand the unique character of it, but we even trust ourselves to know how best to receive it. Every class, we sit down with each other and strive to understand, not as individuals, but as a collective. And this collective pursuit does not solely sit with the students in the class. It is the pursuit of tutors, our friends, and even the dean.

At the end of his statement, Klein says “The problem that we face is how to equip the intelligence given to a student to make him avoid gross errors of judgment, how to free his intelligence from the obstacles that make him deviate from what the ancients called Right Reason. We go on the assumption that men can learn to use their reason rightly.” During my time at St. John’s College, and particularly in the dean’s conversation. I witnessed the learning of “right reason”. I witnessed it in a side room of a dining hall around a small table with students of the liberal arts.