Great Books Student Society

The Great Books Symposium Journal is created and maintained by the Great Books Student Society, an academic club at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. The goal of the club is simple: it encourages students to read more, think critically and develop a love for books. The club stems from the Great Books Curriculum, which focuses on reading and analyzing the works of some of history’s most insightful thinkers.   

   

The club is run by students who organize events for the college and community. Members of the club spread their love of literature by hosting reading, speaking, and discussion events throughout the year, including the annual banned book event, faculty and student panel paper presentations (called symposia), discussions of common readings and annual literary themes, an event based on reading and writing poetry, and the Intercollegiate Student Symposium.   

   

By creating opportunities for the shared reading of texts and organizing events at which students can express and support their claims about ideas contained in Great Books, the GBSS seeks not only to promote literature but also to enable students to develop their critical thinking skills, global awareness, and appreciation of diversity while seeing the world through the eyes of people from other circumstances, places, and times.   

   

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan