A conversation in the mountains

During a recent trip to the US, I got a chance to visit St. John’s College in Santa Fe (New Mexico), a stunningly beautiful town, located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I understood that this college is a special place (it is a college of liberal arts with a humanitarian bias) when I realized that a regular pastime of any student, regardless of age and gender, be it after classes, at night, or in a dorm, is reading a book. Another thing that impressed me with my heritage of Soviet-style student experience (and even that of independent Ukraine) was the atmosphere of incredible mutual respect which dominates here.

Now, when the long-awaited reforms are to start in Ukraine, and I hope they include reforms in education, we could use the expertise of this college (which also seems to be unique for the US).

I asked two students, Nina Medvinska, born in Kyiv, and Rory Gilchrist, about life and studying at St. John’s College.

How long have you been studying here?

N.M.: “I began in January, 2013.”

R.G.: “I have been here a little bit longer, since September, 2012. I came to St. John’s right after I graduated from high school in the suburbs of Chicago. Although, originally I am from England.”

What do you major in?

N.M.: “This school does not have any majors. You come in and it is a set curriculum, a set program, so you don’t choose any of your classes. You basically graduate with a double major and a double minor.”

R.G.: “Nina is right, no one picks a specific concentration or gets to say their favorite subject necessarily. Everyone takes a program, and it is required. I think there is a much greater range of possibilities within that, when you have, as is part of the liberal arts, an opportunity to explore what you do well and what you do less well in a variety of subjects. So, everyone here at St. John’s takes language classes in Greek and French, everyone here takes math classes and calculus, everyone here reads Einstein, Thucydides, Newton, Hume, and Spinoza. Within that set structure, everyone has the possibility to find out what really excites them and interests them, and what he can be good at.”

N.M.: “To add to that, it is really great, because the classes are not segregates. It is not like you go to math, and then it does not connect with anything you are doing in philosophy, for example. Everything connects. And it is really great in that way.”

Could you give me an interesting example of this connection?

N.M.: “Sophomore year, we were reading the Bible, the New Testament, and in music class we were listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and in math class we were studying astronomy, the Ptolemaic model, which heavily relied on the divine and circular motion.”

R.G.: “The same sort of problems that we are beginning to tackle head-on in our laboratory program involves questions of motion and time, and these vector quantities, as explored by Huygens or Newton. And very much at the same time, we are looking in the math tutorial with mathematical techniques that set up. Studying them as young people, which we are, is really interesting and sort of thrusting ourselves into the confusion, and not being too overwhelmed by the fact that there is a lot we do not know, but trusting in each other to help us reveal those common pictures, those perspectives that come when you unshackle yourself from the strict purview of the discipline.”

N.M.: “I also wanted to mention one thing. I just thought of a week ago, what blew my mind, is we were reading Hobbes’ Leviathan in a seminar, and he talks about how the senses we feel, because emotion is pressing on us, and we are pushing back; simultaneously in lab we were doing motion; simultaneously in math we are doing infinity, which is patterned on all those classes.”

Do you have tests and exams?

N.M.: “We have no tests. At the end of the semester we have a transcript, we have a GPA, a semester grade for every class. But our assignments are reading, writing, and talking. So, for the papers we give in we do not get back an A, or a B, or a C, we get back commentary. At the end of each semester, we have something like our evaluation. You sit in a room with all of your professors, and they talk about you as if you’re not there, you’re the third person. And they would say, ‘Miss Medvinska.’ We address each other like we are on the same level. The professors are called tutors, they don’t lecture us. All classes are discussions, we do not have lectures. The part of this program is to learn how to learn. Not to be fed information, be trained, but be an active participant. Why would anything you are interested in require exams or tests? We are learning the most genius works of the world. The fact that some people go to school just to get an A – that is sickening, that’s not an education, that’s trying to be part of the system. I feel like I’m part of an actual educational experience, it feels really honest.”

R.G.: “Your test-taking ability speaks always nothing to what insight you have into a text. If you have confusions in a class, all you have to do is articulate it, and you got a room full of very smart people. And Nina’s right, these are the best ideas that anyone’s ever written down, so very much, I    think, the onus of education, responsibility for that is very much on everyone coming into the class and preparing as best as they can for that subject, knowing that they will never get perfect, but there you’ve got each other to work on it as well. So, people individually understand their commitment to their own education, and further, their commitment to everyone else’s in this community, where we are all learning alongside and through each other.”

What is the main difference between St. John’s and other universities?

R.G.: “For me, one of the big differences is that Johnnies not only are articulate, but they are attentive listeners. Before coming to St. John’s, it felt rare that there was someone who was genuinely willing to listen to me. It is so easy to think “Oh, I know what you’re saying’ and assume you’ve heard them. And Johnnies, I think, 100 percent understand that’s not the case, and that they have an infinitude of life experiences to respect and to learn from when they are talking to someone else. No one at St. John’s is trying to hog the intellectual spotlight or outcompete, use bigger, fancier words to impress the tutors – that’s not how it works. People understand that more valuable is that collaborative, not competitive, approach, in which everyone collectively goes into a seminar room, talks long and hard about difficult, exciting, challenging things, and comes out of that room knowing a little bit more about themselves, and each other, and the ideas that those books contain.”

N.M.: “Also we don’t have any lectures. All our classes are small, and you come in to class not to sit there, but you have to be part of the discussion in every class. Our professors are called tutors, and they address us the same way we address them. We go out to lunch with them.”

R.G.: “I think very much the classroom and the social experience of St. John’s meet each other, so that’s why it would be artificial to have someone lecture at you for a period of time in class. There are lectures of Fridays, but they are separate, they are something that people are excited to go to, because they spend all their time in the seminar, and the seminar is such that you can see in the faces of people around you what effect your words are having on them. You have this instantaneous feedback, where your commitment is noted and respected, and looked for.”

But you have some exact sciences, which need a lecturing-like approach.

N.M.: “That is a very interesting question. We don’t use any textbooks at the school. We only use primary texts. So, we started math with geometry, and we read Euclid’s Elements. Right now we are doing calculus through Newton, which is extremely difficult. We have a process where we understand why this is the equation, because we read the text. We understand why this is the question. We sit in class and we talk about why it works. So, math is into this, math is ‘how’ and ‘why.’”

R.G.: “No matter how good of an arguer you might be, two plus two is never going to be five. But at St. John’s, the emphasis isn’t on expertise; it is not primarily ever based on being totally right. That’s useful, and that’s always an aim. No one’s trying to be wrong, but it doesn’t matter if you have a crazy idea, or what if we try solving this problem in many ways? Even if there’s one right answer, there are many ways of getting the right answer.”

N.M.: “Our tutors will never come into class and say: ‘This is how it’s done.’ No, we have to figure it out. That’s what I mean about puzzle-solving.”

R.G.: “Expertise is not our goal. More important is the fluency in how is it that we understand what we know, how can we use experiments to influence a theory, how do we adapt our theory when our experiment proves our previous theory was wrong?”

N.M.: “For example, we learn the history of mathematics and the history of science along with the mathematics and the science. So, we often study people that are wrong today, but we study them in order to later understand how the people after them were right. We studied Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler; for months we think of the world as being in its center. That’s how it is, that’s how we talk about it, no one will dare say that’s not how it is, no. And then we move on.”

NINA MEDVINSKA: “ALL CLASSES ARE DISCUSSIONS, WE DO NOT HAVE LECTURES. THE PART OF THIS PROGRAM IS TO LEARN HOW TO LEARN” / Photo by Volodymyr DAVYDENKO

R.G.: “And those shifts in thinking, moving from the Ptolemaic, a geocentric worldview, to a heliocentric worldview, that’s intense, that’s amazing, especially as you think about: ‘Okay, Ptolemy’s wrong, the Earth does in fact go around the Sun, but he’s got this fantastically elaborate, very intensely accurate, more accurate than Kepler. So, I think spending time grappling with ‘wrong’ answers is instructed to really get you to appreciate and to observe when those big meteoric shifts in perspectives of the world are needed and what they might look like, and how we can be perpetually honing and improving the ways in which we, as human beings, understand, interpret, explain, and explore the world around us.”

You said that your tutors are on the same level as you. But they do have another status. On which things is their authority based?

N.M.: “The tutors at the school are not people who are always right. They’re not people who have all the answers, no. They are people who are learning with you. No matter if they have a Master’s, a Ph.D., if they have been teaching here for 30 years, they are still learning with you. The thing that got me, one of the craziest things that happens, as you have these really intelligent professors, who care about what you have to say. We respect them, just as we respect each other. If students do not respect each other, they probably won’t respect their tutor.”

R.G.: “There are practical pragmatic differences. Firstly, students pay the college to be here, the teachers are paid by the college. But I think one thing that makes it closer, than further apart, is just as we mentioned, students are taking all areas of the program – tutors as well are teaching all areas of the program. An archeology Ph.D. taught my freshman math class – she was great, my seminar tutors were in Eastern literature and theology, we’re reading the Ancient Greeks. When you’ve got a specific interest, the tutors are great resources. But in classroom, just because tutor X has been here for decades and has read The Republic 12 more times than you and sees way much more in it, your response to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave isn’t any more or less valid because of who you are, than what the tutor might contribute to a conversation.”

N.M.: “So, if you teach here, you love learning, just like if you’re a student here, you love learning. As a teacher here, you can’t sit on your achievements, you constantly have to be learning with your students.”

R.G.: “They are attentive, they make sure that the conversation doesn’t veer off and would go somewhere really productive. Great tutors often will just ask very simple questions, ones that we hadn’t even realized we hadn’t asked. But they’re using their best judgment to really be exploring and pushing each one of us further than we thought we could go. And that’s what’s really valuable about the tutors I admire the most.”

So, you do not have competition among students here? But all people have ambitions.

N.M.: “Absolutely. So, the main authority in any classroom is the text. Not the student, not the tutor, but the author. And how can you be competitive with a genius? You need all the help you can get from all your peers to understand this genius. People who are competitive, they leave. An ambition is to be a good St. John’s student. There are the four P’s: you’re present, prepared, participating, and profound – in that order. So, those are the keys to success. If you are an ambitious student, you will do your reading, you will think through it deeply, you will internalize it, you will come into class and be open to demolishing all of you opinions.”

R.G.: “That’s a certain type of ambition. I think after St. John’s, a lot of people want to do really cool difficult things. If they can learn Ancient Greek in a year and a half, they know that within themselves is a capacity to really throw their minds at a question, at a problem, and to have the verve, to have the audacity to tackle things and say: ‘Yeah, I don’t know it yet, but I’m going to learn it.’”

N.M.: “If someone would tell me three years ago that I would love calculus, I would laugh in their face. Math this year is one of the most mind-blowing, inspiring classes I’ve ever taken. I am in love with math.”

Who has the best chances to graduate from St. John’s College?

R.G.: “I would say there is no real profile of any person who would be suited to graduate from St.       John’s. As to who can graduate, I think it is roughly a coin flip, 50 percent of people who come in as a freshman, leave as a senior within 4 years. That’s very common, when all your teachers and you sit down together and say, like, is this the best place for you? In some cases, it’s ‘well, you’ve worked hard and there’s something that’s not clicking. I don’t think that staying here at St. John’s is good for you in this moment.’ And it’s not a goodbye forever, many people do, after they’ve been disenabled, come back after a year or a few off, because that’s an experience they need. Some people drop out for financial reasons – this is an expensive place to be. But I think on the whole, because St. John’s is fundamentally based on a human desire to know and to inquire, and to find out more, literally anyone who even thinks they might enjoy reading and talking, and discussing about ideas has within them the ability to graduate.”

N.M.: “I want to make one thing clear: because this school is alternative, you can’t study for a test the night before, pass it, and forget it, no. You have to work every single day for four years.”

R.G.: “You have these great moments, these ‘Eureka!’ moments, and it is immediately followed more confusion. Just cause you’ve read these books once, does not mean you’re ever going to finish these books. Forbes Magazine rated St. John’s College in Santa Fe as the most rigorous school in the United States. People have said to us: ‘Damn, what you do here is rigorous.’ We are taking a double major and a double minor. Our course load is so great, that you can drop the lowest two credits out of your GPA and still graduate.”

N.M.: “The work here is very reasonable, but I think the reason it’s so rigorous is that it’s relentless. It does not stop. This school teaches you how to read. Every single week you’re reading these amazing texts for four years. It changes the way you look at the world, and you want to read it, you want to spend hours reading. You’re not like, ‘Oh God, I have to do all of this work.’ No, it’s like, ‘Do you want to do math with me?’ It’s a collaborative process.”

R.G.: “Schoolwork leads into the social work. It gets a little crazy at times.”

Do you have a student government of some sort?

R.G.: “Students are involved in the decisions that are made around them. I myself play a role of treasurer in the Student Polity Council. That’s an organization that discusses a lot of things. As polity treasurer, I work on making sure exciting things like the plays that happen here, or the clubs that happen here, or movie nights and pizza nights, just fun times to blow off some steam from the program. Students are involved in letting that happen and definitely have a say. I think Johnnies are actually pretty politically engaged, more so than other people I know my age. The motto of St. John’s College is something in Latin, and the traditional translation is ‘I make free men by means of books and balance.’ But I prefer this translation: ‘I turn libertines into libertarians under the weight of all these books.’ I think in a certain sense, it’s kind of a pressure of the biggest ideas. We’re reading Hobbes and Spinoza, we’re still on Kant. We read the US Constitution and Supreme Court cases, a big part of the philosophy of St. John’s program is a political philosophy.”

N.M.: “But we started with the Greeks’ political system, and read The Iliad, Thucydides, Herodotus, then the Romans, so we begin to see politics as this long chain of history, that people are kind of making the same mistakes over and over again, but kind of not.”

R.G.: “I think Johnnies realize that they have a stake in that outcome, and what’s more, they have a voice, which they can use to decide how that outcome happens. I think that’s a lot of things that a lot of the people I graduated the high school with sort of get it, but mostly don’t, it doesn’t mean anything to them.”

Did you become more intent to make compromises here, or more principled?

N.M.: “If you do this program right, you do not come out more rigidly principled. For example, your principle is openness, ideally. Finding a solution is not looking at things black-and-white as right and wrong. Finding a solution is looking at the root and core of the problem, and working together with people of different opinions to fix it. You learn how to talk to people you don’t agree with, people you don’t like. You are with these people for four years, it’s hard sometimes. But you learn how to work through that.”

R.G.: “I’ve lost a fear of being wrong. There are no big jaws opening up to eat me whole, because I      made a mistake. I’m human, we make mistakes. Often freshmen enter with these pretensions: ‘Oh, I know this, I know that.’ And you’ve got to kind of break it down: your soul sort of has to be demolished so it can be built anew again. If you dont teeter on the fringe of insanity at St. John’s, then you’re not paying attention. But at the same time, I know that I can trust myself, even if that means being wrong sometimes. And I can trust others, as long as I am there to catch them and to support them when I’m seeing something differently from how they’re seeing it.”

It was interesting to observe the speeches: even the unsuccessful speakers were greeted with kindness and applause.

N.M.: “Yeah, for four years we’re reading people who spent lives pondering the human condition. How can you not become more understanding? It’s kind of what Rory said, when you come in here as a freshman, sometimes you come in, like, ‘I’m so smart, I know all this stuff,’ and then they shatter it. And then you don’t really know anything, ever. You just keep trying to continue the journey. So, you become a much more accepting person.”

R.G.: “And when someone plays a really squeaky violin on the open mike, you’re not applauding for their mistakes. But what’s worth applauding, that I think people recognize in the audience, is that you went up there, good for you, and secondly, when you’re up there, you saw something beautiful, even if in your violin playing, even if just for a little bit, you got to something that was more genuine and more beautiful about being human. That’s really special, and even if it wasn’t a masterpiece brilliant violin sonata, it was still being a real human being, so thank you for sharing that with us.”

How do you see yourself in the future?

R.G.: “I want to go back to my home country, England, to study physics there. That’s a big goal, I’ve got a long way to go for that, but I’m ambitions and confident I can do it, because in class I know I can trust myself, and I can trust my own visions and questions about things.”

N.M.: “I know that I will never be bored: that is the greatest gift. I could be alone on an island and I will never be bored because of this school, because I will never finish learning. If I live till 85, I will be learning, and that’s my future. My future, ideally, is never standing still, constantly finding out what I don’t know, and constantly trying to know more, that’s what it is for me – growth.”