What is friendship? What is a good life? How can a political community protect liberty and provide order? What is the common good? Explore the big questions of civic life with SCL’s world-class faculty. Zero advance preparation required.
Each seminar brings together bright, motivated high school students for a discussion on an essential text of Western civilization or the American political and economic tradition.
This semester, we will read excerpts from Aristotle, John Locke, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and more.
Take up a serious intellectual challenge with the support of SCL faculty and staff.
Choose from multiple upcoming seminar dates that fit your schedule.
Each session offers a focused, immersive academic experience in just a few hours.
For questions about Freedom & Virtue Seminars or SCL Info Sessions, contact:
SCL professors lead Freedom & Virtue Seminars on campus in the Littlefield Home at the University of Texas.
SCL offers two majors: Civics Honors and Great Books Honors.
The honors curriculum in SCL challenges students to cultivate, and then demonstrate, an exceptional level of academic maturity. All SCL academic majors challenge students to intensive reading, writing, and speaking.
The skills students need to lead well are difficult to acquire. SCL faculty, tutors, and mentors guide students in their quest to cultivate habits of careful reading, thoughtful writing, and compelling rhetoric.
SCL offers two honors majors, Civics Honors and Great Books Honors. In Civics Honors, all students complete a thesis and an internship. In Great Books Honors, all students participate in a focused small-group course sequence dedicated to reason, rhetoric, and virtue, then choose from a thesis, capstone, or internship.
The School of Civic Leadership offers a pre-partisan education that prepares students for success across career paths. Before citizens can deal competently with the issues of the day, they need an education that enables them to wrestle with—and draw on the wisdom of—the traditions that inform American life. Spirited, thoughtful, and open to critical self-reflection, this pre-partisan education introduces students to moral and intellectual resources that can orient their own lives.
SCL might be your intellectual home if you want a serious intellectual challenge, you’re eager to do something good in the world, and you’re excited to make friends.
The SCL intellectual challenge centers on intensive reading, writing, speaking, and deliberation. SCL faculty, tutors, and mentors guide students in developing these key leadership skills.
The SCL academic program starts with the big questions: what does it mean to live well? What is justice? How do American constitutional principles enable citizens to think differently and yet live together? SCL majors explore these questions through essential texts of the western intellectual tradition and American constitutional experiment. You’ll thrive in SCL if you want to thoughtfully engage these questions and texts.
Texas Civic Leadership is a fit for students who want to ask big questions and cultivate deep skills to prepare for a life of service across a range of careers.
SCL offers a classical and professional education to prepare students for business and entrepreneurship, science and technology, education and law, or public service and diplomacy. Civic leadership starts here.
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