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 $540 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 |
|---|---|
| 1-6 | Herodotus, The History (selections) |
| 7-10 | Aeschylus, Oresteia |
| Week | Tutorial |
|---|---|
| 1-10 | Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics |
Spring
| Week | Seminar |
|---|---|
| 1-2 | Machiavelli, The Prince |
| 3-5 | Hobbes, Leviathan (selections) |
| 6-8 | Rousseau, Second Discourse |
| 9-10 | Shakespeare, The Tempest |
| Week | Tutorial |
|---|---|
| 1-10 | Shakespeare, Tragedy (Hamlet, 2025) |
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 | Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals |
| 9-10 | Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams |
| Week | Tutorial |
|---|---|
| 1-10 | Bible (Genesis, Job, Matthew) |
Autumn
| Week | Seminar |
|---|---|
| 1-5 | Euclid, Elements (Bk. I) |
| 6-10 | Descartes, Meditations |
| Week | Tutorial |
|---|---|
| 1-10 | Novel (War and Peace, 2024) |
Winter
| Week | Seminar |
|---|---|
| 1-2 | Aristotle, Physics (Bk. I, ch. 1; Bk. II) |
| 3-5 | Lucretius, The Nature of Things |
| 6-8 | Newton, Principia (selections) |
| 9-10 | Darwin, On the Origin of Species (selections) |
| Week | Tutorial |
|---|---|
| 1-6 | Virgil, The Aenied |
| 5-10 | Augustine, Confessions |
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 |
|---|---|
| 1-4 | Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (selections) |
| 5-7 | Plato, Symposium |
| 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 (1776, 1787) |
| 3-5 | de Tocqueville, Democracy in America |
| 6 | Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural (1863, 1865) |
| 7-10 | Toni Morrison, Beloved |
| Week | Tutorial |
|---|---|
| 1-10 | Plato, Phaedo |