MORAGA -- As prime faculties and schools accentuate deal with making ready scholars for jobs after graduation, a few query the price of a liberal arts training in an more and more technical world.

But no longer this week at St. Mary's in Moraga. The varsity is website hosting a summer season camp with the catchy identify of "COMMUNICATE Again to Socrates" the place highschool scholars from the Bay Space and past dig into nice works of literature and technology to be informed how math, science, literature and philosophy are all hooked up -- and the way one self-discipline can depend on another.

Students on the camp tackled literary, mathematical and philosophical geniuses akin to Plato, Sophocles and Shakespeare, dissecting the difficult texts and sharing various evaluations. They comparable what they learn in "Euclid's Optics" and Leon Battista Alberti's "On Portray" to assist them know the way artists interpret what they see with their eyes and the way they painting that imaginative and prescient onto a canvas or different medium.

"The optics are very interesting, as a result of I HAVE by no means in reality considered how the attention works," mentioned Dana Pine, a 17-year-old Northgate Prime senior from Walnut Creek. "We had been studying so much approximately intensity and arithmetic. I DID NOT understand how a lot arithmetic need to do with imaginative and prescient. We really needed to do a large number of measurement."

The distinctive software teaches scholars to assume significantly via in-depth magnificence discussions, hands-on actions and box journeys to museums, the Palace of excellent Arts and a

Cal Shakes efficiency of "The Tempest."

It gives scholars a style of the Vital Software at St. Mary's, a liberal-arts top by which a small crew of scholars explores a wide range disciplines by taking the similar lessons together, studying vintage literature after which wondering its that means and relevance. Lessons come with tutorials and seminars taught consistent with the "Socratic method," wherein professors are known as tutors as a result of they information discussions, as opposed to lecture, mentioned Professor Joseph Zepeda, who directs the camp.

"You can provide scholars all of the solutions within the world, but it surely does not topic if they are not asking the questions," he mentioned. "It should be their questions for it to subject. That is the other of an information unload. It's essential to ask them to assume seriously a few made-up paragraph, however that does not set them on fire."

Although the categories don't essentially educating technical activity skills, the scholars agreed they have been finding out useful abilities that may lend a hand them right through their lives.

"It will educate you ways to assume and so that it will be helpful it doesn't matter what you do," stated Veronica Oberholzer, 16, a senior at Holy Names Top in Oakland. "It will give you an even foundation."

Students have been additionally inspired by the open-minded responses they gained from their classmates, even if they disagreed.

"You're now not seeking to persuade them that your opinion is best than theirs," Pine mentioned. "IT IS simply like, 'Well, that is my tackle it' and those admire that. It is nice."

Since best 15 scholars are enrolled within the camp and they're residing on campus, they're mastering one another neatly and really feel relaxed sharing their views.

"We in fact be mindful people's critiques on faith or philosophy," stated Elizabeth Casey, 17, of Pacifica, a senior at St. John's Academy in San Francisco.

While creating their very own friendships, they realized how Socrates taught approximately that matter by studying "Lysis" by Plato.

"Our end was that a friend's any person you could be informed one thing from," stated Pine. "HOWEVER you may also be offering them something."