Lives Worth Knowing

This course is a gallery of real lives, organized by virtue rather than by century. Each unit takes one virtue — courage, justice, honesty and integrity, perseverance, self-command, compassion and mercy, loyalty, humility — and holds three or four people from deliberately different eras and nations inside it, so that courage in ancient Athens, in twentieth-century Germany, and on the Underground Railroad sit in one unit and speak to each other. Each life is taught as one person, one moment, the choice on the table — the act, the cost, and the price paid — never a cradle-to-grave summary or an abstract sermon. The admiration is earned by honesty: every unit includes at least one figure who did the hard right thing and lost, complicated figures are named as complicated, and legend is flagged as legend. The course admires the virtue in the act; it hands down no verdict on the whole person.

Lessons run as a focused read plus a 20-minute reflective write, with two spaced-retrieval quizzes along the way. There is no high-stakes final: the course closes on a synthesis unit, "The Bench in Your Head," where the student takes stock of the exemplars he has gathered and considers who he will stand near next.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.