Humane Letters

A Great Books Program · High School · Opens Any Term

Humane Letters is Emerson Latin's Great Books program: a five-volume sequence of guided reading, discussion, and original writing, conducted entirely in English, that moves from the ancient world to the present. It exists for two reasons at once: to form a critical reader and a creative thinker capable of wrestling seriously with the largest questions a mind can take on, and to prepare that same student for the international writing competitions that reward exactly those habits. Where the Latin courses train a student to read one language with precision, Humane Letters trains the same student to read an entire intellectual tradition the same way: closely, seriously, and in conversation with the ideas that built it.

How the Program Is Built

The five volumes are not five unrelated units. They form a single continuous argument, each volume answering, testing, or overturning the one before it, in the manner of a genuine philosophical dialectic rather than a survey course. A student moves through the invention of a governing idea, its extension to the individual, its testing against society, its unmasking as historically contingent, and finally its confrontation with total systems and a planetary scale, arriving, by the end, somewhere quite different from where he began. The readings themselves range across literature, philosophy, political thought, religious writing, psychology, and literary criticism. What the reading list consists of, session by session, is not something I publish here; it took years to build, and I would rather a family encounter it inside the course than see it summarized on a page.

Before a student's first volume, everyone completes a brief matriculation orientation, regardless of format. From there, a student working one-to-one moves through the five volumes in order, Volume I through Volume V. A student joining an existing small-group course instead begins wherever that group currently stands in the sequence, since a small-group seminar can open at the start of any of Emerson Latin's five annual terms, time and space allowing, rather than waiting for a new Volume I to begin.

Five Parts, Every Session

Every session, in every volume, follows the same five-part structure.

Explication. Each session opens with the close reading of a short poem, chosen specifically for how it stands next to that week's primary text, sometimes in harmony with it, illuminating the same idea from a different angle, sometimes in open friction with it, arguing back. This is closer to the old French practice of explication de texte, a rigorous method of accounting for every formal choice in a text, than to a modern reading quiz, and it shares real lineage with what the critic I. A. Richards, in the early twentieth century, called practical criticism: the discipline of reading a text closely enough that it can defend its own meaning without a biography or a footnote standing in front of it.

Seminar. The heart of each session is an extended Socratic discussion of that week's primary text, not a lecture and not a quiz, but a sustained conversation in which the student is expected to arrive at, defend, and revise an interpretive position under real questioning. This is the Seminar in the tradition the educator Robert Hutchins had in mind when he described a Great Conversation running continuously across centuries: the idea that the most serious books ever written are not separate monuments visited once and left behind, but participants in a single, ongoing argument, and that a student earns his own place in that argument by reading the originals directly rather than a summary of them. Conducted one-to-one or in a small group, each Seminar addresses the specific point the text occupies in the volume's larger dialectic, so that no single week's discussion stands alone.

Commonplace. Between sessions, the student maintains what the syllabus calls a Commonplace notebook, a practice with real history behind it. Educated readers once kept a physical commonplace book: a running record of passages, arguments, and reflections, copied out and returned to, the tool John Locke himself formalized into a personal method for organizing what one reads. The version I ask students to keep is closer to its modern descendant, the Zettelkasten, a note-taking system built on atomic, single-idea notes linked to one another as genuine connections emerge, rather than filed under an outline decided in advance. Essays, including entries for the international writing competitions students take part in throughout the year, grow out of this notebook rather than being drafted cold, though the notebook proves useful for a good deal more than essays alone over the course of a volume.

Imitatio. Each session also includes a short, focused exercise in sentence-composing: one specific grammatical construction, practiced through the deliberate imitation of well-built sentences. The practice reaches back to Renaissance humanism, where a student was expected to achieve copia, a working abundance of expression, precisely by imitating the sentence patterns of acknowledged masters before ever attempting anything original. The habit is older still: Quintilian, writing on the education of the Roman orator, treated imitation as one of the foundations of eloquence, alongside natural talent and practice. A student who has spent a year moving through these exercises does not simply have more vocabulary. He has a wider range of sentences he can actually build on demand.

Roots. Because the ideas in this program eventually touch on concepts that trace back to Greek or Latin, each session closes with a short study of vocabulary drawn directly from that week's reading: the word, the sentence it came from, an original sentence the student writes using it, and the classical root underneath it. A program built on close reading in English still returns, every week, to the two classical languages underneath most of the vocabulary English actually has to think with.

Admissions

Admission to Humane Letters runs through three stages, completed in order before a student's first volume: Tenure, a full year already completed somewhere in the Latin curriculum; a short written Essay, reviewed personally; and a Viva, a short spoken conversation about a poem, conducted in the tradition of the Oxford English admissions interview. Advancing from one volume to the next afterward simply requires passing the volume before it.

On Credit and Standing

Each volume carries 1.0 Carnegie Unit, structured so that a receiving school may record it as English/Language Arts credit or as History/Social Science credit, whichever a given transcript needs. I am pursuing accreditation with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) for Emerson Latin as a whole, Humane Letters included.

One Honest Note

This program asks a great deal of a student who is often already carrying a full Latin course load elsewhere in the curriculum. It is not a light addition. I built it for the specific student who has already shown, in a year of Latin, that he reads seriously and wants more of that seriousness applied somewhere else.