Among other institutions, Providence graduates have gone on to enroll in five of the top 25 Great Books programs as ranked by Best College Reviews. These include the four top-ranked schools — Biola University’s Torrey Honors Institute, New St. Andrews College, Hillsdale College, and St. John’s College — as well as 22nd-ranked St. Olaf College.
The authors of the Great Books program rankings ask us to “imagine school not as a place to sit and listen to lectures for a few years, but rather, a way of life and pursuit of most noble ends. Imagine school as an ongoing conversation about the most profound ideas mankind has conceived: truth, justice, liberty, beauty, poetry, drama, God, and the afterlife to name a few. Imagine being taught by the greatest masters of the mind that walked on this earth: Plato, Jefferson, Franklin, Locke, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Aristotle, Aquinas, and more, who though dead, live on in Great Books.”
Of course, for those of us at Providence, such an education is not at all difficult to imagine, because it is the type of education our upper school students already enjoy in a context of Biblical faith: using history’s greatest books to fuel seminar-style discussion of life’s most important questions in a way that cultivates a life of wisdom, virtue and eloquence.
We are grateful for the kind of classical, Christian, community-fostering K-12 foundation we are able to lay at Providence and for the growing number of institutions offering programs expressly seeking to build on that foundation.
Read more about the top ranked Great Books programs and how they were selected here.
http://www.bestcollegereviews.org/features/best-great-book-programs/
