Portal:Illinois/Selected article/25

Shimer College was an American Great Books college in Illinois. Founded as the Mt. Carroll Seminary in Mount Carroll, Illinois in 1853, it was renamed Shimer College in 1950, when it began offering a four-year curriculum based on the Hutchins Plan of the University of Chicago. Although the University of Chicago parted with Shimer (and the Hutchins' Plan) in 1958, Shimer continued to utilize a version of that curriculum. The college left Mount Carroll for Waukegan in 1978, moving to Chicago in 2006. In 2017, Shimer was incorporated into North Central College as the Shimer School of Great Books in Naperville.

The academic program of the college, and of the Great Books School today, is based on a core curriculum of sixteen required courses in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. All courses are small seminars with no more than twelve students and are based on original sources from a list of about 200 core texts broadly based on the Great Books canon. Classroom instruction is Socratic discussion. Shimer was governed internally by an assembly in which all community members had a vote.

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