About the Lyceum Institute

Look at nearly any online educational institution—or traditional educational institution that offers online courses—and you will see the same verbiage: save money, learn the skills employers seek, graduate faster, advance your career, “don’t worry, this is accredited”, flexible, personalized, etc., etc. Seldom if ever is it even suggested that the program will acquaint its students with the truth, foster in them better habits of thinking, or be in any way a benefit to their lives aside from a material advancement. Education is framed entirely as a means to a good independent of what it contains itself.

By contrast, the goal of the Lyceum Institute is to foster good habits of being human, attained both through a retrieval and a furthering of the classical intellectual tradition of the Western world. We aim to reinforce these habits continually through a persistent and growing community that offers something more than just a curriculum. We provide no degrees, credentials, certificates: rather, we provide a structured environment for continued study, regardless of one’s background. “All human beings desire to know”, Aristotle starts his Metaphysics—and here, we take that seriously.

Enrollment in the Lyceum Institute, and the attempt to join in the satiation of this essential human hunger, is open to all-comers: graduate and undergraduate students, professors, clergy, the philosophically-seeking general public, and so on.  Experts and novices alike profit from the community of common purpose and the mutual support in the pursuit of bettered habits.  It is affordable (costing less per month than most streaming entertainment services); accessible by computer, tablet, or phone, wherever one has an internet connection; and always-improving.

Members choose their own trajectory of study, with options to enroll in offerings from the Trivium, Latin, Greek, Philosophy Seminars, Reading Circles, and many other communal opportunities for inquiry and learning. We also boast a large archive of asynchronous courses. Some courses come with prerequisites—others may be taken whenever offered. The goal of our program is not to move students through a set number of courses within a set period of time, but to develop new learning continually and to reinforce good habits daily.

Once enrolled, all of our programs are accessed through Microsoft Teams. A full orientation video (and regularly-scheduled live orientation sessions) help members become acclimated to navigating the platform.