Our History

We started Classics Unplugged during the COVID-19 lockdowns as a summer online enrichment platform. We were then  junior-high students from North America and East Asia, and we were used to meeting each other at the Great Books Summer Program at Stanford. We began Zooming to continue our discussions and to help each other with Latin. Somehow it turned into this.  More than fifty students from seventeen states and eight countries, committed to tackling current problems with  Classical ideals.

"The Classical Tradition is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. The goal toward which this conversation society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue The spirit of this civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos, which is Greek for the word.  Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the people. The Classical ideal is not one or the other strand in the conversation, but the conversation itself. " –Robert Maynard Hutchins, University of Chicago, 1952

"The Classical Tradition has been a stirring adventure whose sum and consequence we all bear within ourselves.  Yet we hear much now about the breakdown of this tradition. We must recover our Classical roots – not out of critical reverence, but to gain the self-understanding necessary for dealing with our current dilemmas." –  Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 1991.

"Any study of the Classical Tradition should be especially concerned to recover the voices or highlight the experiences of those who are not always adequately represented in surveys of Greco-Roman civilization. The proliferation of scholarship in social history, in the history of the family, and in the history of women has made necessary the inclusion of these perspectives."  – Marvin Kishlansky, Sources of the West, 2012.