Students learn strategies for engaging with a diversity of texts, asking meaningful questions about them, and effectively participating in collaborative discussions regarding them. Reading and writing assignments are specifically designed to support students’ gradual development of these strategies and skills.

Reading List

• Plato,  Allegory of the Cave

• LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

• Woolf, How One Should Read a Book

• Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

• Al Ghazali, Manners to be Observed by Teachers and Students

• De La Salle, Third Meditation for the Time of Retreat

• Seneca, Moral Epistle #88

• Spiegelman, Maus

• Epictetus, The Handbook

• Terence, The Brothers

• Alexie, What You Pawn I Will Redeem

• Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail

• Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

• Sophocles, Antigone

• Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (selections)

• U.S. Supreme Court, Korematsu v. the United States (1944)

• Johnson, Melvin in the 6th Grade

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 9

• Cervantes, The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious

• Ovid, Metamorphoses (selections)

• Bettleheim, Uses of Enchantment (selections)

• Ptolemy, Almagest (chs. 1-7)

• Galileo, Starry Messenger

• Mo Tzu, On Universal Love

• Matthew 5 – 7, Sermon on The Mount

• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (chs, 2 & 12)

• Homer, The Odyssey