Welcome to video three. In the first video, I talked about the great defect of modern education—subjects sealed off from one another by watertight bulkheads, students learning everything except the art of learning.
In the second video, I introduced you to the Great Conversation: a six-year integrated humanities course in which a single cohort of twelve to sixteen students reads the primary texts of the Western tradition in chronological order, from Genesis and Homer to Lewis, Tolkien, and Solzhenitsyn.
In this video, I want to answer the practical questions about the course. It’s one thing to agree that children need a humane education. It is another thing to build an academic year for a real child in a real family with real limitations.
So let me walk you through exactly how this course works.
The Schedule
The cohort meets with me live, online, twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, for ninety minutes per session. We conduct two weekly Socratic seminars modeled on the Adler and Hutchins Paideia approach. Each year runs thirty-two weeks, organized into four eight-week terms, with natural breaks at the regular academic intervals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and summer.
Ninety minutes, twice a week, may not sound like much compared to a seven-hour school day. But I’d ask you to consider what actually happens in those hours.
It would be distracting to talk about it in this video but you can watch my 11-minute short film called, We’ve Been Schooled to learn why it happens. In short, modern education has succeeded at what it set out to do, which is to occupy the family’s valuable time by having students do busy work to prepare them for the industrialized State.
In any case, I love what Hutchins said about our modern education model:
“The American scheme of an eight-year elementary school, a four-year high school, and a four-year college, with graduate and professional work on top of that, is unique in the world, and we cannot congratulate ourselves on its uniqueness.“
In a Socratic seminar, no one hides in the back row. Every student reads, every student reasons, every student speaks. Three hours of genuine dialectic, sustained across six years, will form a mind in ways that thousands of hours of passive instruction never will.
The Course Curriculum
This is one integrated course, but it does the work of many. Studying the great books in an integrated fashion weaves together literature, history, philosophy, theology, geography, civics, economics, art, music, and architecture, along with some math, astronomy, and natural science where the tradition itself takes them up, as when we read the ancients on the cosmos or the early moderns on the new science. And running through all six years: logic, writing, and rhetoric, taught not as separate subjects but naturally and organically through the texts themselves.
The writing progression is deliberate. Students begin in year one with narration and imitation—learning, as I frequently tell my students, that good writing is clear thinking made visible. They progress through analysis and argumentation, and they finish in year six with a substantial senior thesis, defended aloud before their peers. Six years of weekly writing under the eye of one teacher who knows exactly how each student’s prose has developed since he or she was twelve years old.
Course Credits and Outcomes
Each year of The Great Conversation is technically worth four high school credits, distributed across humanities, writing and rhetoric, logic, history and civics, theology, and fine arts. Over six years, that’s twenty-four credits, which means this one course provides your student’s complete humanities education. As a parent, you need to add, really, only three things: gymnasium or PE, a mathematics sequence, and laboratory science. Everything else is here, and it is integrated rather than scattered.
I want to pause on that point, because I’ve counseled hundreds of homeschooling families, and I know where the burden actually falls. It is not usually the math curriculum that exhausts parents. It is the finding and coordination of five or six separate providers, each with its own philosophy, its own schedule, its own gaps. As I have been saying, one of the chief weaknesses of modern education is fragmentation. But reality is not fragmented this way. All truth belongs to the One Truth. A better education helps students see the integrated nature of knowledge; it helps them understand the world as cosmos rather than chaos.
Reading Load
We begin gently. In the first term of year one, students read twenty to thirty pages a week, enough to go slowly, to reread, to wonder. The load grows deliberately each year, so that by years five and six students are reading at a genuine college-preparatory pace, over a hundred pages a week, and handling it with confidence because they were led there step by step. In the Great Conversation, the student is led, not driven.
The Teacher and the Community
Curriculum matters, but curriculum alone is not enough. Education is mentorship. It is discipleship. It is transformation. A child is always being formed; the question is not whether formation is happening. The question is: who is forming the child, and toward what end?
For six years, your child will be formed in a community of serious-minded Christian peers, reading the greatest books ever written, under a teacher who has spent more than thirty years in this tradition, as a classroom teacher, a pastor, a college professor, a journal editor, and the president of a classical education institution. I will know your child’s mind. I will know how he reasons, where she hesitates, what he loves, and what she is capable of. There is no substitute for that kind of continuity; even though there are some wonderful courses and teachers out there, no year-by-year program can offer it.
The Ideal Student
Now, the last question is who is this course for?
It is for families committed to a classical Christian education who want the depth of a great books formation without assembling it piecemeal. It is for students who are curious, who ask hard questions, and are not content with the surface of things. And it is for parents who understand that students who take this course are committing to something bigger than their self-comfort and contemporary conveniences. They are committing to the work of securing an ultimate possession.
Disclaimer
And I’ll be honest with you: this course is not for everyone. A six-year commitment is a serious commitment. A student who does not want to read should not be made to fill one of these seats. There are better paths for that child, and I’d be glad to help you find one.
In the final video, I’m going to extend the invitation: describe the details of enrollment, talk about the investment, and explain why this cohort—unlike nearly every other course you will ever consider—enrolls once and then closes.
I’ll see you there!
