(Remarks at Lawrence University Conference: “Tutorial Education: History, Pedagogy, and Evolution”) March 31, 2007 – Christopher Nelson, President, St. John’s College, Annapolis
Although St. John’s College’s roots go back to 1696, its current program of instruction came to us by way of a transplant exercise in 1937. In one brief summer, an old model, based on a traditional four-year liberal arts curriculum with an elective system, was fully replaced by something still referred to as The New Program. Prior speakers have spoken of faculty resistance. For St. John’s, it was bankruptcy or the New Program. The Program was brought to us by two members of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ 1936 Committee on the Liberal Arts, both of whom had studied together at Oxford, in Balliol, where they borrowed a few of the ideas they later brought to the college. We had here a program in search of a college and a college that couldn’tafford to resist.The New Program consisted then, much as it does now, of a handful of features that distinguish it from most other colleges:
- It is an all-required curriculum, consisting of four years of a mathematics tutorial, four years of a language tutorial (two years in Ancient Greek and two in Modern French), two years of music (a chorus and a tutorial), three years of a laboratory in the physical and biological sciences (also conducted in part as a tutorial), and four years of a seminar, where great works are read in English translation and discussed in a very free and open way.
- The faculty, all of whom bear the title “tutor”, are expected to teach across the curriculum, ideally over time teaching in every part of the program.
- Texts consist almost entirely of original source books, a collection of roughly 130 great books or papers, which are the material for study in every part of the program. Text books are not used.
- The lecture is relegated to a single, formal, Friday night affair open to the entire community. (We don’t permit partying to begin before 10:30 p.m.) Lecturing is not permitted in the classroom. Conversation is our daily activity, supplemented by a host of devices designed to support classroom conversation: things like individual oral examinations, the writing of papers, paper conferences, and small study groups (formal and informal).
The function of the tutorial must be understood in the context of the whole Program, which is a fully jigged affair, a whole piece covering a four year span of study. We offer no courses; students have no majors. All classes are simply parts of a single, whole plan of study.
The heart of the curriculum is the seminar --- a discussion of assigned readings from the books of the program. In each seminar seventeen to twenty students work with two members of the faculty who serve as leaders. The group meets twice a week, on Monday and Thursday evenings, from eight until ten --- or sometimes well beyond if the topic under discussion has aroused a sustained and lively conversation. The assignment for each seminar amounts, on the average, to around eighty pages of reading, but may be much shorter if the text happens to be particularly difficult.*
The seminar begins with a question asked by one of the leaders. Thereafter the seminar consists mostly of student discussion. Students talk with one another, not just to the leaders. They do not raise their hands for permission to be heard, but enter the discussion or withdraw from it at will. The resulting informality is tempered by the use of formal modes of address.
Once underway, the seminar may take many forms. It may range from the most particular to the most general. The reading of Thucydides, for example, is almost certain to elicit a discussion of war and aggression and to bring to the surface the students’ opinions and fears about the wisdom or error of national policies. Homer and Dante prompt reflections on human virtues and vices and on humanity’s ultimate fate. Sometimes a seminar will devote all its time to an interpretation of the assigned reading, staying close to the text; at other times the talk may range widely over topics suggested by the reading, but bearing only indirectly on the text itself in the minds of the participants. In the coffee shop after seminar, students from different groups compare the points made in their discussions.
Beyond the requirements of common courtesy, we respect that all opinions must be heard and that every opinion must be supported by argument. An unsupported opinion does not go far.
The course of the discussion cannot be fixed in advance; it is determined rather by the necessity of “following the argument,” of facing the crucial issues, or of seeking foundations upon which a train of reasoning can be pursued. The argument does not necessarily lead to the answer to a question. More often than not the question remains open with certain alternatives clearly outlined. The progress of the seminar is not particularly smooth; the discussion may sometimes branch off and entangle itself in irrelevant difficulties. Only gradually can the logical rigor of an argument emerge within the sequence of analogies and other imaginative devices by which the discussion is kept alive.
At its best, the seminar may reach insights far beyond the initial views held by any of its members.
The seminar cannot suffice as the only setting for liberal education. By its very nature, the seminar does not give the student an opportunity to cultivate the habits of methodical and careful study and of persistently precise discussion and writing. Other learning devices must therefore support it; these are the tutorials in language, mathematics and music. For each of four years, a student attends one language and one mathematics tutorial three times a week, Sophomores also attend a music tutorial.
In the tutorials, around a table, about twelve to fifteen students study and learn together under the direct guidance and instruction of a tutor. The tutorial provides conditions for a small group to work together toward a careful analysis, often through translation or demonstration, of an important work. As in the seminar, students talk freely with one another and with the tutor, but the discussion focuses sharply on assigned tasks. There are opportunities for all students to contribute their measure of instruction and insight to their fellows.
Writing assignments are normally made in all classes: mathematics, music and laboratory sections, as well as in language tutorials. The students are thus called upon continually to articulate and organize their thinking in both the written and spoken forms.
The language tutorial attempts to provide the tools or skills for precise communication. It is a restoration of the traditional studies of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, seeking to foster a grasp of the relations between thought and imagination on the one hand and language on the other. The study of Ancient Greek in the first two years and Modern French in the second two years provides the means to these ends. The rapid reading for the seminar, with its attention to the large outlines and the general development of a central idea, is supplemented and is corrected by a more precise and analytic study, concerned with the particular details and shades of meaning and with the logical structure and rhetorical pattern of a given work. This work also supports the seminar by giving the students a richer understanding of the problems of translation, as most seminar readings are read in translation.
The tutorial is not designed to master a foreign language, but instead to give the students some greater understanding of grammatical forms and a grasp of the peculiar qualities of the language they study.
Some say that the Mathematics tutorial is the best part of the Program at St. John’s --- that is, the part we are most successful in doing together. This may be because of the unusual quality of the book our students spend most of their Freshman year reading, Euclid’s Elements, where students gain a notion of deductive science and of a mathematical system.
There are two main reasons for studying mathematics. First, it pervades our modern world, perhaps even defines it. Therefore anyone who means to criticize or reform, to resist or cooperate with this world, not only must have some familiarity with the mathematical methods by which it is managed, but also must have thought about the assumptions that underlie their application. It is the task of the mathematics tutorial and the laboratory together to help students to think about what it means to count and measure things in the universe.
The second main reason for studying mathematics concerns the mathematics tutorial more specifically. Since mathematics has, as its name implies, a particularly close connection with the human capacity for learning, its study is especially useful in helping students to think about what it means to come to know something.
To prepare themselves for such reflection, students study artfully composed mathematical treatises, demonstrate propositions at the blackboard, and solve problems. By doing this over four years, they learn a good deal of mathematics and they gain noticeably in rigor of thought, nimbleness of imagination, and elegance of expression. But while they are practicing the art of mathematics in all its rigor, they are continually encouraged to reflect on their own activity. Scores of questions, of which the following are examples, are raised during the four years:
I have spent so much time describing tutorial content and purpose, rather than method or mode, because all learning is connected to content and empty without it. At the college, we have not started with “means”, but with the “ends” of inquiry, to find a way we might study the material together to learn best what’s to be learned. I’ll describe a number of those ways that belong to the tutorial or to the tutorial’s historical underpinnings in more individualized instruction, which also takes place in other parts of the program:
- We have leveled the classroom. Faculty are called tutors (more literally “guardians” or “guides”), as they do not profess to any truths or ways of reading in the classroom. They serve without title or rank. All students and faculty are addressed by their surnames as “Mr.” or “Ms” “So and So”. This adds formality to the class and encourages respectful engagement with one another. It also creates an atmosphere of greater equality between tutors and students, and of adult maturity. Hierarchy has been abolished. Arguments are judged solely on their own merits, not on the basis of their congruity with the opinions of the tutors.
- We require the writing of papers in tutorials, usually six per year in the language tutorial, and 3-6 per year in the math and music tutorials and in the laboratory. These are not research papers, but thoughtful reflections on a question occasioned by the reading or discussion of one or more of the books or arguments studied in class. Most tutors meet individually with each student outside of class about each of the papers --- an extraordinary amount of individual attention, usually given more to the content of the thinking that has gone into the writing than to the form of written expression itself.
- Each year, every student must write a major essay for their seminar classes. Generally, their tutorial tutors serve as advisors to those papers. This special one-on-one advising activity can be the single most rewarding opportunity for a student and a tutor to learn together. That has certainly been my experience.
- Oral examinations are conducted each year on the seminar papers: one student with two tutors in the Freshman through Junior years, and in the senior year, an open public examination among the student and three tutors over the capstone Senior essay. We have no final written exams. Consider then that tutors may have as many as 90 paper conferences in a language tutorial and another 60 in Math or Laboratory, another 3 to 5 Seminar Oral Exams, 2 to 4 senior essays to advise, 20 oral exams on seminar papers and advising on Freshman and Junior papers --- lots of individual attention.
- Our tutorials are neither lecture driven nor exam driven. We care less about the mastery of content than about the practice of careful, public thinking out-loud about timeless and difficult questions. Quizzes may be used to assure ourselves that vocabulary is learned, forms or notation understood, or simple skills of proof or argument acquired, but these are generally thought useful for only the most elementary of our tutorial tasks.
- We have, over the years, worried that we have not provided enough opportunity for individualized instruction, an occasion for the deep and careful study of an individual work or body of material, either one-on-one with a tutor or in very small groups. We have found two ways of resolving this concern which seem to work reasonably well. The first is that we have found ways of encouraging a proliferation of study groups, arranging for small core groups of three to five students to take all their classes together so that they can form a natural study group to help each other prepare for class or follow up together on exciting classroom discussions. Our students find dozens of other ways each year to come together to study in small groups, with or without faculty, about anything and everything that pleases them. Hence, we have “Plato in the Springtime”, which are Sunday evening study groups with tutors on dialogues not read in the Program. A similar group reads Shakespeare plays not otherwise read. We have our own version of Bloomsday: two students read all of Homer’s Iliad (or Odyssey) without ceasing over a 24 hour period. Some study Virgil in Latin, Dante in Italian, Chaucer in Early English. We have pre-lecture seminars organized by the Student Committee on Instruction, and after-hour study groups following the showing of a classic film. We couldn’t count the number of such groups. A second device we have found has become a regular part of the program. It is the formation of an 8-week “preceptorial” in the junior and senior years, when we suspend our evening seminars and break up into smaller classes led by a tutor expressly for the purpose of the sustained study of a single book or small number of books. A preceptorial paper is expected at the end of this class too.
- Tutorial classes are sufficiently small that no one can hide. Participation (oral expression) is expected. Classes are also sufficiently large that a kind of discussion can develop that is much, much different from any you can imagine occurring in the narrow confines of a two person conversation, even between two people with broad imaginations. The conversation that can develop with a group of 10 or more somehow belongs to all of them, and to no one of them in particular. It takes on a life of its own, sitting out there in the middle of the table, available for all to participate in.
- The arrangement of furniture can thus be important. We have no desks, no rows of chairs or tables, no lecturn or podium. All classes take place around a single, roughly square table. Students bring no laptops to class, only books. Note taking is generally discouraged because, in the moment of the taking of the note, the student is drawn away from the conversation, from the moment in which learning takes root.
- We discourage the use of all outside sources in the classroom. This is not because one cannot learn from commentators, but because those people are not available to us in the classroom for questioning. Hence, we rely on no outside expertise and do our best, sometimes fumbling and bumbling, to find our way to a helpful place with only the texts and one another available to help us.
- Our mode is one of questioning. Questioning opens us to new learning. It also opens us to self-examination, to the discovery of how little each of us really understands about what we think we know. So our questioning is radical and deep, going to the elements and foundations of things. A proffered answer is then only an occasion for the next question.
- The give-and-take of the classroom is not the Q&A between a tutor and a student, but takes place among all of the students. In the best classes, the tutors are virtually silent. The students are learning from each other.
- We have an artifact from our founders’ years at Oxford. It is the “don rag”. This is a twice yearly learning/assessment ritual in which all five of the student’s tutors come together to talk about the student and his or her work in their classes each semester --- with the student present in the room as a witness to the conversation. This conversation is held as though the student were not present, and the student is spoken of in the third person. The object is for the tutors to come to learn more from each other about the student, and about his or her learning in all parts of the program --- then to provide advice for the student’s benefit on how his or her learning experience might be improved. The conversation is thereafter open to the student for comment and advice.
- Students have a responsibility to their classmates for their classmates’ learning and for the quality of the class, not just for their own learning. They are assessed on their failure or success in helping others to learn. Presence in class, preparation for class, participation in discussion, and responsiveness to the questions or concerns of classmates are all expected. The don rags and other informal meetings with students are occasions for reminding our students of their responsibilities to others.
- In the end, the tutorials are the place where we ply the liberal arts, the skills of the intellect. (Eva Brann) Here we recite passages, work out translations, and demonstrate proofs before the whole class, whose job it is then to question, correct, work out difficulties, and exercise the imagination on the meaning of their activity together. Yet, even here, where we’re plying the tools of the trade, our mode tends to radical reflection, a free root-seeking ethos that pervades the college with what some would call, in the Socratic tradition, the asking of radically uncoercive questions. We aren’t testing, challenging and refuting each other when we talk; we are instead seeking to get to the bottom of something really bothering us, seeking the truth of a thing.
------* The preliminary discussion of the seminar and the tutorials in the first half of this paper is drawn heavily from the College catalogue, “The Statement of the Program.”
