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As a comparison, here is a curriculum that also intends to be a “Classical Liberal Arts Education,” from another school, St. Johns College. St. Johns adopted the “Great Books” approach, inspired by Mortimer Adler, in the 1930s. I don’t think its approach has changed much since then. The overall impression is very different than the curriculum I presented. I give it here for contrast and comparison. I like my more practical, contemporary approach better, but nevertheless I have the impression that this curriculum maintains high standards and would be quite worthwhile, in its own way. Thus, I think it still has many advantages compared to the typical offerings of universities today, of dumbed-down disorganized mediocrity poisoned by Cultural Marxist garbage. The number of items is, generally, less than I presented. But, this could be balanced with more focus on each item, which is also a worthy and productive approach.
Year 1
- Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
- Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
- Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
- Thucydides: Peloponnesian War
- Euripides: Hippolytus, The Bacchae
- Herodotus: Histories
- Aristophanes: Clouds, Frogs
- Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
- Aristotle: Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
- Euclid: Elements
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things
- Plutarch: “Lycurgus” and “Solon” from the Parallel Lives
- Ptolemy: Almagest
- Blaise Pascal: Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids
- Nicomachus: Arithmetic
- Antoine Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry
- William Harvey: Motion of the Heart and Blood
- Essays by: Archimedes, Gabriel Fahrenheit, Amedeo Avogadro, John Dalton, Stanislao Cannizzaro, Rudolf Virchow, Edme Mariotte, Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, Hans Spemann, Guy Beckley Stearns, J. J. Thomson, Dmitri Mendeleev, Claude Louis Berthollet, Joseph Proust
Year 2:
- Hebrew Bible
- New Testament
- Aristotle: De Anima
- Apollonius: Conics
- Virgil: Aeneid
- Plutarch: “Caesar”, “Cato the Younger”, “Antony”, and “Brutus” from the Parallel Lives
- Epictetus: Discourses, Manual
- Tacitus: Annals
- Ptolemy: Almagest
- Plotinus: The Enneads
- Augustine of Hippo: Confessions
- Maimonides: Guide for the Perplexed
- Anselm of Canterbury: Proslogium
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica
- Dante: Divine Comedy
- Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
- Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, Discourses
- Nicolaus Copernicus: On the Revolutions of the Spheres
- Johannes Kepler: Epitome IV
- Livy: Early History of Rome
- Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli
- Michel de Montaigne: Essays
- François Viète: Introduction to the Analytical Art
- Francis Bacon: Novum Organum
- William Shakespeare: Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Sonnets
- Poems by: Andrew Marvell, John Donne, and other 16th- and 17th-century poets
- René Descartes: Geometry, Discourse on Method
- Blaise Pascal: Generation of Conic Sections
- Johann Sebastian Bach: St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
- Joseph Haydn: Quartets
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Operas
- Ludwig van Beethoven: Third Symphony
- Franz Schubert: Songs
- Alessandro Striggio (music by Claudio Monteverdi): L’Orfeo
- Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms
Year 3:
- Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
- Galileo Galilei: Two New Sciences
- Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
- René Descartes: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
- John Milton: Paradise Lost
- François de La Rochefoucauld: Maximes
- Jean de La Fontaine: Fables
- Blaise Pascal: Pensées
- Christiaan Huygens: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
- Baruch Spinoza: Theologico-Political Treatise
- John Locke: Second Treatise of Government
- Jean Racine: Phèdre
- Isaac Newton: Principia Mathematica
- Johannes Kepler: Epitome IV
- Gottfried Leibniz: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
- David Hume: Treatise of Human Nature
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
- Molière: Le Misanthrope
- Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations
- Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
- Lorenzo Da Ponte (music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart): Don Giovanni
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Emma
- Richard Dedekind: Essay on the Theory of Numbers
- Articles of Confederation
- The U.S. Declaration of Independence
- The Constitution of the United States of America
- Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: The Federalist Papers
- Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- William Wordsworth: The Two-Part Prelude of 1799
- Essays by: Thomas Young, Brook Taylor, Leonhard Euler, Daniel Bernoulli, Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell
Year 4:
- Supreme Court opinions
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust
- Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, “Logic” (from the Encyclopedia)
- Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky: Theory of Parallels
- Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
- Plato: Phaedrus
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
- Documents from American History
- Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches
- Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches
- Søren Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
- Richard Wagner: Tristan and Isolde
- Karl Marx: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
- Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
- Herman Melville: Benito Cereno
- Flannery O’Connor: Selected Stories
- Sigmund Freud: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal
- Booker T. Washington: Selected Writings
- W. E. B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk
- Edmund Husserl: Crisis of the European Sciences
- Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings,
- Albert Einstein: Selected Papers
- Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
- William Faulkner: Go Down Moses
- Gustave Flaubert: Un Coeur Simple
- Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse
- Poems by: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry, Arthur Rimbaud
- Essays by: Michael Faraday, J. J. Thomson, Hermann Minkowski, Ernest Rutherford, Clinton Davisson, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, James Clerk Maxwell, Louis-Victor de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Gregor Mendel, Theodor Boveri, Walter Sutton, Thomas Hunt Morgan, George Wells Beadle & Edward Lawrie Tatum, Gerald Jay Sussman, James D. Watson& Francis Crick, François Jacob & Jacques Monod, G. H. Hardy
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