O I love to go a wandering

Routeburn Track anyone?

Senyum Kambing

Great Books for Life

Shimer is a small independent four-year liberal arts college located just minutes from downtown Chicago. Our students develop their capacity for critical thought and interpersonal communication through careful reading of the Great Books, which sustain a life-long passion for learning. With classes of 12 students, a full-time teaching faculty, and great books, Shimer offers a rare and enduring educational experience.

At Shimer College, students who love to read, think, and discuss ideas come together in small classes to experience learning like they’ve never known it before. Shimer classes are conversation at its best: everyone works together to make each meeting an adventure in intellectual discovery. If you like to read and think and have meaningful discussions—in the classroom and beyond—then Shimer is the place for you.

As a Shimer student, you will become part of a community whose very purpose is to explore the great works of the Western intellectual tradition. These comprise the College’s core curriculum. By studying texts that are widely thought of as “classics,” you will take part in the Great Conversation about ideas that have shaped our world. You will learn to puzzle over and appreciate beauty, analyze theories, and grapple with old and complex problems that have challenged human thinkers for centuries.

Shimer is about education in the noblest sense of the word. It’s a place to learn how to think, not what to think. It’s a place to develop a breadth of knowledge in the Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social sciences that is very rare in our age of specialization, yet extraordinarily useful in today’s ever-changing world. It’s that rare place where everyone’s views are valued, where careful and caring discussion and respect for difference are the rule, not the exception. Shimer College is an intentionally small, exceptionally student-centered liberal arts college. Perhaps it is just what you’ve been looking for.

Why Great Books?

Many fine books are available in our culture, but very few qualify as great. Although people argue about any given list of the Great Books, almost everyone agrees that they are few in number and possess certain characteristics. One of these is that they are foundational to our current culture and situation—decisive steps on the path to the present. This view accords with Erskine’s belief that such texts are the best introduction to Western culture. A second characteristic is that they may serve as exemplars of a period or field of inquiry. A third is that they contain so much richness that even the expert, re-reading the text for the umpteenth time, will find new ideas and insights. The Great Books do not teach us what to think, but how to think. A fourth is that these texts often deal with timeless issues, as relevant today as when they were was written, centuries or even millennia ago.

The ancient Greek and Latin classics are only some of those found in the Shimer curriculum. Many more recent works, including a selected few written by living authors, are included as well. These works have been selected not because they are old, but because they so influential as to be necessary reading. Standards of greatness are of course subject to change, and so to some extent is Shimer’s curriculum. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases, greatness is an enduring quality. It is hard to imagine a thoughtful reader denying the greatness of Plato’s Republic, Newton’s Optics, or Euclid’s Elements when these works have, among other things, generated productive conversations for generation after generation among people of hugely varied backgrounds.

The breadth of most of the Great Books is remarkable, which means that the conventional system of specialization does not fit them well. That is why Shimer’s curriculum is divided into broad areas (Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Integrative Studies), and why interdisciplinarity is encouraged throughout the course of study. Everyone at Shimer has a common basis for conversation, and we use it time and again, with each other and across the generations of Shimer students. (Shimer alumni reunions always include classes held on familiar texts from the Hutchins Plan, with 70-year-olds speaking across the table with 30-year-olds.)
At Shimer, we love the Great Books. We read them, discuss them, and reread them. The Great Books are the common bond that unites us and encourages us to view in each other fundamentally as equals in the Great Conversation.

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