ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE IN ANNAPOLIS, Maryland is an unusual place. Students are rarely lectured, they are never given any tests and there are no electives. In fact, there are no professors at St. John's. Students spend their entire four years reading and discussing a range of great books.

They go from the Greeks (Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes and the like), to the Roman, medieval and Renaissance periods (Chaucer, Dante, Machiavelli, Shakespeare etc.), to the 17th and 18th centuries during their third year (Hobbes, Cervantes, Milton, Bernoulli and so on). Finally, it's all concluded in their senior year with works like the United States Constitution, various Supreme Court opinions, Darwin's Origin of Species and poems by the likes of T. S. Eliot and Yeats.

Students get a broad-based education. They get nearly all their input directly from the original source. When learning about Physics and Astronomy they read the words of Newton and Galileo. On mathematics, the readings include the formidable words of Euclid, Pascal and Archimedes. These great books are the real teachers at St. John's.

The common theme that emerges in interviews with alumni is how their years at St. John's taught them how to think. One emerges from St. John's with a broad cross-section of worldly wisdom and an unusual ability to analyze new information in the context of all that worldly wisdom.

The notion of worldly wisdom comes up often when Warren Buffett's partner Charlie Munger is talking about the art of investing. Charlie gave one of his rare speeches to students at the University of Southern California's School of Business in 1994. That speech unified the seemingly disparate notions of Worldly Wisdom, Success Investing and The Latticework of Mental Models.

Two of my favorite quotes from that remarkable speech are:
"To a man with only a hammer, every problem looks
like a nail."

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