July 22-29, 2023
Chicago, IL
The Great Connections Seminar brings young adults together to discuss the great ideas of civilization and discover remarkable connections between these ideas and the contemporary world they inhabit.
Through this process, they commonly gain a deeper sense of autonomy and personal power.
At a Great Connections Seminar, we discuss great writing and ideas in groups of 15 or less. The readings are linked together by a theme such as “Reason and Love” or “Reason and Power.” We read texts from philosophy to physics, spanning the ages and the ideological spectrum, from Plato and Aristotle to Ludwig Von Mises and Tom Wolfe. Students receive detailed instructions before the Seminar including materials to read in advance.
“Ortega y Gasset”, “The Role of Choice in Love,” “Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy”, and “Newton’s Principia” on the laws of force are examples of texts we use.
We have a set of special discussion principles that participants agree to abide by.
During the Great Connections we explore art, architecture, music, and personal psychology and introspection to expand participants’ awareness of their own inner life. In conjunction with this, we visit art museums, historical sites, famous buildings, and concerts. These outings are guided by experts, such as famed architect John Gillis.
We also engage in improv comedy workshops as a way to enable participants to get to know each other in a relaxed and fun manner. This improves their intellectual discussions and collaboration. Improv also hones skills of collaboration and mutual investigation.
The week-long Great Connections is most often held in Chicago, with students residing at local college dorms where classes are held in conference rooms.
— Sofi Abud
Schedule
The Seminar will be hosted from July 22-29, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. You may review the schedule here.
Seminar Fees
Tuition covers all Seminar programming for 7+ days; Room and board includes 8 nights, plus opening and closing dinners.
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Scholarship Information
There are a limited number of scholarships covering tuition and some room and board. If you do not receive a scholarship, your fee will depend on when you apply. For details on applying for a scholarship, submit an application and indicate that you would like to apply for a scholarship as well. For more information, email Felicia Goglia at felicia@reliancecollege.org.
Young people who attend our programs experience tremendous change on multiple levels:
— Jake Ilson
A free society is a marketplace of ideas in which each person is treated as an autonomous individual.
Every classroom is a society of its own as well, in which a social order emerges from the following elements:
Many students have spent years in classrooms that create a social order dominated by an authority-teacher. Students are expected to be followers who receive the wisdom of the authority and repeat it back in class, on tests, in papers and projects.
Does this reflect the characteristics of a free society? We say “No”. Unfortunately it is often the only learning environment students have known, in high school and college.
Our Seminar facilitators use their expertise to craft the entire learning environment: physical, cognitive, psychological, and social, with every element selected and integrated to empower the student’s autonomy.
Seminar participants come to appreciate each other as mutual traders in learning. This results in a psychologically safe and cooperative environment that encourages exploration and creativity. Ultimately, the Seminar functions as a market of ideas, skills, and values where reason, combined with the invisible hand of individual self-interest, results in greater knowledge, reasoning, and social skills for all.
Students become confident that they can understand anything firsthand—without an authority interpreting it for them, and without conforming to the opinions of others. This deep self-confidence is foundational to a flourishing life.
During the Great Connections Seminar, a unique society that reflects life in full freedom emerges within this specially crafted learning environment.
The values and virtues developed in each person at the Seminar help to create the experience of a free, voluntary, and cooperative society. It foreshadows what is possible in a freer future, while giving students the opportunity to practice the art of living free. This is why our students find themselves liberated and transformed.
— Michael Natividad
All learning at the Great Connections is in collaborative discussions with the teacher as a guide to the material, not the authority with the answers. Using our unique shared-inquiry methodology, instructors help students examine, analyze, and discuss the material firsthand using an evidence-based process.
The students synthesize the information themselves, rather than have the information and answers handed to them.
Students learn a great deal from hearing how other students reason about the same material. Our students study logic, science, literature, art, mathematics, architecture, economics, politics, and history. We enable them to be sure-footed in whatever ideas and domains of knowledge they encounter, no matter what profession they enter.
Ultimately, reason is the only authority, meaning that the best reasoning along with the best evidence have the final say.
Our program is a specially crafted form of the guided collaborative discussion method developed in the early part of the 20th century to teach The Great Books. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, assembled a committee of brilliant thinkers and educators, including John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, Mark Van Doren, Richard McKeon, Scott Buchanan, and Stringfellow Barr to devise this program.
In the late 1920s, they were worried about the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges which fail to educate in great ideas and reasoning, and in the products of Western civilization and thought. They knew that an education in the liberal arts, with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary, integrated, and moral learning was essential to developing the free human being and the foundation for real professional and personal success.
Our advisor, Michael Strong, explains the method and its academically and personally superior outcomes in his book The Habit of Thought.
— Carmen Rodriguez Alcaron
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