Overview of St John's College

Mission Statement

St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland was chartered in 1784 upon a most liberal plan for the benefit of youth of every religious denomination. In 1937 the New Program, under which the college still operates, was instituted. Under it, we help our students learn to ask fundamental questions and practice thoughtfulness in public. We introduce them to the textual tradition of reason that illuminates such central features of modern life as democracy and technology, as well as to the literary and musical tradition of the West. We are committed to the use of a list of great books that is both fairly stable and under continual review. These are books agreed to be excellent, to form a coherent sequence, and to raise most cogently questions we want our students to consider. We foster literacy in three kinds of texts: verbal, mathematical, and musical. Read more… We want our students to develop the intellectual virtues of courage in inquiry, caution in forming opinions, candor about their ignorance, open attentiveness to the words of their colleagues, industry in preparation, and meticulousness in verbal translations as well as in mathematical demonstrations. We give our students the experience of living in a community of learning imbued with attitudes of consideration and respect that foster moral virtues appropriate to their future lives as citizens. We think that the college has a wider mission in contributing to the invigoration of American education by giving help to other institutions that ask for it, by encouraging our students to become teachers, and by providing to a wide constituency occasions for actual learning in the spirit and through the materials of our program.

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