Basic Program of Liberal Education

Curriculum

Basic Program Certificate Structure

  • Students take one course each quarter of the Academic year (Autumn, Winter, Spring).
  • Courses meet for three hours, once a week, for ten weeks. Each course consists of a 90-minute Seminar, covering three or four texts, and a 90-minute Tutorial, which involves in-depth analysis of one or two texts. 
  • Students read a weekly assignment before each class, but there are otherwise no tests, papers, or grades.
  • Students take the curriculum in order, starting with Autumn of Year 1 and progressing with their classmates in the same section from quarter to quarter and year to year. It is also possible to begin the program in Winter or Spring.
  • Participants earn a certificate upon completion of the entire four-year curriculum, as well as some of the privileges of University of Chicago alumni.
  • Tuition is $525 for each ten-week course.

Course Types

For students who have completed at least two years of the Basic Program Core Curriculum, we offer Alumni Sequences and Courses:

  • Alumni Sequences are two-year, curated courses of study to deepen the conversation and provide the same cohort experience as in the Core Curriculum.
  • Alumni Courses are designed by instructors to further your studies beyond the Core Curriculum. Individual courses are offered on a quarterly basis.

Our open-to-all courses provide students with an opportunity to study texts using the Basic Program methodology on a course-by-course basis. These courses include: 

  • How to Read Classic Texts
    How to Read Classic Texts is a Basic Program methods course recommended for new students. One of the foundational premises of the Basic Program is that reading is a skill one can improve through theoretically informed practice. In this short course, we examine the theoretical perspective on good reading contained in Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.
  • September Mini Courses
    Choose from a selection of bite-sized three-week courses.
  • Summer Courses
    Offered on a variety of topics and lasting from 4-8 weeks, these courses fit conveniently in your summer schedule.
  • Ten-Week Open-to-All Courses
    Basic Program instructors offer Open-to-All courses throughout the academic year on topics ranging from literature to philosophy.

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-3 Introduction; Sophocles, Antigone
4-6 Plato, Apology and Crito
7-10 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Week Tutorial
1-10 Plato, Meno

Winter

Week Seminar
1-5 Herodotus, The History (selections)
6-10 Aeschylus, Oresteia
Week Tutorial
1-10 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Spring

Week Seminar
1-3 Machiavelli, The Prince
4-6 Hobbes, Leviathan (selections)
7-8 Rousseau, Second Discourse
9-10 Shakespeare, The Tempest
Week Tutorial
1-10 Shakespeare, Tragedy

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-3 Sophocles, Oedipus the King
4-6 Aristotle, Poetics
7-8 Euripides, The Bacchae
9-10 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
Week Tutorial
1-10 Homer, The Iliad

Winter

Week Seminar
1-6 Homer, The Odyssey
7-8 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
9-10 Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Week Tutorial
1-10 Plato, The Republic

Spring

Week Seminar
1-2 Montaigne, Essays
3-4 Pascal, Pensées
5-8 Nietzche, On the Genealogy of Morals
9-10 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Week Tutorial
1-10 Bible (Genesis, Job, Matthew)

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-2 Aristotle, Physics (Bk. I, ch. 1; Bk. II)
3-4 Lucretius, The Nature of Things
5-7 Newton, Principia (selections)
8-10 Darwin, On the Origin of Species (selections)
Week Tutorial
1-10 Novel

Winter

Week Seminar
1-6 Virgil, The Aeneid
7-10 Augustine, Confessions
Week Tutorial
1-4 Euclid, Elements (Bk. I)
5-10 Descartes, Meditations

Spring

Week Seminar
1-3 Aquinas, Treatise on Law
4-5 Locke, Second Treatise on Government
6-10 Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
Week Tutorial
1-10 Dante, Inferno

Autumn

Week Seminar
1-3 Plato, Symposium
4-7 Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (selections)
8-10 Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Week Tutorial
1-10 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

Winter

Week Seminar
1-4 Aristotle, Politics (Bks. I, III)
5-7 Smith, Wealth of Nations (selections)
8-10 Marx, Kapital (selections) and The Communist Manifesto
Week Tutorial
1-10 Lyric Poetry

Spring

Week Seminar
1-2 Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist 10 + 51
3-5 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
6 Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural
7-10 Toni Morrison, Beloved
Week Tutorial
1-10 Plato, Phaedo