VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video The Great Books.

The purpose of our Great Books program is to move students from a place of mental chaos to mental order. In other words, we want to ground students in the wisdom and tradition of the past so that they will become strong and confident thinkers despite being surrounded by conflicting messages in the world today.

What if we could get authors like Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Aquinas into a room and get them talking to each other about the most fundamental and important questions in our lives? And what if we could be in that room so we could listen to the conversation, ask questions, even engage in the conversation? This is what our Great Books program is doing. Those brilliant and wise thinkers are the real teachers of our program. Our role as teachers is to introduce the students to the great minds in that room, guide them through the conversation, and give them the skills they need to engage. We believe that such an education can profoundly change a student’s life.

There are three skills that students must have to effectively engage in that great conversation, and we seek to train students in these three skills: reading well, thinking well, and communicating well.
First, we want students to read well because the great conversation is going on through books, and so a student must be able to read well to engage.

Second, we want students to think well. We want them to be able to discern between wisdom and foolishness, a skill that is so necessary today.

Finally, we want students to communicate well. We want students to grow in wisdom, and then have the ability to effectively lead their family in wisdom, to lead their community in wisdom, to lead their nation in wisdom. To train students to communicate well, we have made seminar discussion and writing foundational parts of the Great Books classroom. Through the continual repetition of these foundational practices, students become skilled communicators, and so capable leaders.

Download, play and edit free videos and free audios from The Great Books using RedcoolMedia.net web apps