The Great Ideas Club

The Great Ideas Club, founded by Shirelle Ben-Shahar in 2023, is designed for students interested in honing their critical thinking skills while gaining a deeper understanding of themselves and their environment. By exploring seminal works from different cultures—novels, short stories, films, plays, and essays—club members examine the conceptual building blocks of the world in which they live. Rooted in the Great Books movement, this club aims to cultivate philosophical thinking through the study of influential texts. While the Great Books movement traditionally focuses on the classical texts of the Western world, The Great Ideas Club broadens this scope by embracing diversity and inclusion. In meetings, members discuss a particular idea (from justice to Ren, from friendship to Ubuntu) through the lens of a great work (from a play by Shakespeare to a treatise by Confucius, from a poem by Emily Dickinson to a short story by Chinua Achebe). The great ideas studied are not sterile, stagnant concepts confined to the classroom but rather permeate the lived lives of participants. Deep rumination on ideas like kindness, collaboration, purpose, and empathy is precisely what our individual and global worlds desperately need.