“To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.”
Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation
SEVENTH GRADE
Jack Schaefer, Shane
Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows
William Gibson, The Miracle Worker
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Poetry Selections
EIGHTH GRADE
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Beowulf
Roger Lancelyn Green, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table
Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Poetry Selections
NINTH GRADE
The Federalist Papers (selections)
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (selections)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Frederick Douglass, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Selections of American Short Stories and Poetry
TENTH GRADE
William Shakespeare, Richard II
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (selections)
John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (selections)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (selections)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (selections)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Selected British and European Poetry & Short Stories
ELEVENTH GRADE
Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey
Aeschylus, the Oresteia
Sophocles, the Theban plays
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato, Meno, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Apology, Crito, Phaedo and Republic
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Augustine, Confessions
Athanasius, On the Incarnation
Gregory Nazianzus, On God in Christ
Selected Poetry
TWELFTH GRADE
Augustine, “The Spirit and the Letter”
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (selections)
Shakespeare, Macbeth and Hamlet
John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract
Dante, the Inferno
James Agee, A Death in the Family
Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Michel de Montaigne, “In Defense of Raymond Sebond”
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History
Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov