New Gelati Academy is a classical “liberal arts”¹ baccalaureate program with the addition of some elements that are designed to equip students to make an effective transition to careers or graduate study after receiving their diplomas from New Gelati Academy, the school of liberal arts and sciences of Grigol Robakidze University. New Gelati is located in Tbilisi, Georgia and the primary language of instruction is English.²

New Gelati is OLEG's primary partner in promoting traditional liberal arts education in the country of Georgia. Through OLEG's partnership with New Gelati we together have identified their primary needs as

OLEG continues to assist and work with New Gelati to achieve these goals and seek out more ways to fullfil our larger mission of promoting traditional liberal arts education in the country of Georgia.

Below is more information about New Gelati's intentions and program written by the Dean of New Gelati Academy, Lancelot Fletcher.

Character and intention of this program:

New Gelati Academy’s program is designed to equip students for a life as free, active and prosperous citizens. The term “liberal arts” originally referred to those studies that are appropriate to a free person, a person who would be an owner, a manager or a leader. Someone who would need to be able to think for him- or herself. Someone who would be able, not only to decide on his own actions, but someone who would be able to give direction to others.

The original Gelati Academy from the 11th century, and Ikalto Academy as well, both had traditional liberal arts curricula which were organized around two groups of courses that were called the Trivium and the Quadrivium (which simply meant “the three roads” and “the four roads”). The Trivium included three subjects that are related primarily to language: grammar, logic (or dialectic) and rhetoric. The Quadrivium included four subjects related primarily to mathematics: arithmetic, geometry, harmony (or music) and astronomy. The Trivium and the Quadrivium will form the core of New Gelati’s program, but not under those names. Instead, New Gelati Academy’s program will center around the reading of the Great Books. In this respect, New Gelati Academy is modeled on St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, one of the oldest and most famous colleges in the United States, and one of the first to adopt the Great Books program as its curriculum. St. John’s College is our primary American source in the development of New Gelati Academy.

The program of New Gelati Academy aims to prepare students to think for themselves, to function in a world where jobs, professions and ideas are changing rapidly so that narrowly specialized training may soon become irrelevant or obsolete. We aim, therefore, to equip students with the capacity to think, to learn, to inquire, to judge what is truly important.

What is the best way for an educational institution to accomplish such results? Our program is based on an idea which may at first sound paradoxical, but which stands at the center of what is called liberal education – by which we mean the education that is fitting for a free man; the education that prepares a person to be free; the education that liberates. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed to an answer that you might not expect. He wrote: “Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.”

Liberal education, we believe, is a way of learning how to expect the unexpected. Why? you may ask. The answer is surprisingly simple: If you are not free, if you are a slave or a worker in an organization whose job is just to take orders and follow instructions, ‘then dealing with the unexpected is not part of your job, because if something unexpected occurs, it will be somebody else’s job to figure things out and that person will tell you what to do. But if you are free, if you are not somebody who spends his life taking orders, then sooner or later something unexpected will happen and then you will be the person who needs to figure out what to do. You won’t be able to turn to somebody else to tell you what to do because you will be the person responsible and other people will be turning to you. For this reason it is fair to say that liberal education is essentially education for leaders. In fact it is the original form of leadership education.

To learn to expect the unexpected requires, we believe, an educational program that does two things:

First, the program requires students to spend time looking at those things which do not change. What does not change? God and the universe as a whole do not change; also unchanging are the fundamental questions about God, the universe and our relationship to God, the universe, one another and ourselves. How do we learn about those questions? Primarily by reading books written by the greatest thinkers and artists. In a liberal arts program students are assisted to learn from those who have reflected most profoundly on the fundamental questions, those from whom we can best learn, not answers, but how to reflect profoundly on those questions ourselves. That is why the curriculum at New Gelati Academy is centered around reading the great books.

Second, to learn to expect the unexpected, our educational program requires that students be given the opportunity to gain experience of the world and to lead. That is why the students at New Gelati Academy take an entrepreneurship course in which they actually start their own businesses, and why for two months during each of the 3rd and 4th years students will spend two months in full-time internships with businesses, NGOs or government agencies gaining real-world experience.

Mode of instruction in New Gelati:

It is easier to say what the mode of instruction at New Gelati is not than to say what it is, because it is intentionally quite different from what most of us are accustomed to. What most of us are accustomed to is university courses in which teachers lecture and students study from textbooks – which sometimes have been written by the lecturers. At New Gelati there are no textbooks and the regular classroom sessions do not consist of teachers lecturing. Some people may describe New Gelati Academy as a “Great Books” school. This is not false, because most of what the students read in New Gelati is from what we call Great Books. But it is extremely misleading because, “great books” is not a subject matter in the same way as law or mathematics. In fact we say that the real teachers at New Gelati Academy are the authors of the books we read – Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Rustaveli, Dante and others, and the Great Books are the form in which those teachers are present in the classroom. Since the real teachers at New Gelati are the authors of the Great Books, the faculty members at New Gelati are to be regarded, not as teachers in the usual sense, not as those who know or who have already mastered the material that the students are expected to learn, but as advanced students whose function in the classroom is to assist less advanced students to read, especially to learn how to read deeply and to enter into conversation with the real teachers – the authors of the great books – and with one another.

Learning at New Gelati Academy proceeds from the activities and initiatives of students. Each course involves a somewhat different type of activity. Most of the courses require that the students do a significant amount of writing. In the music course students are required to sing and dance. In the language course students will experience many different aspects of language, including memorization and recitation of poetry, dramatic performance, learning one or two foreign languages and translation. In the laboratory course the students perform experiments, systematic observation and field work. The Seminar is for conversation, dialogue, about readings from the Great Books. Although all of the courses at New Gelati have some of the Great Books as their foundation, in the Seminar is the one place where the students enter into a conversation with one another about the ideas contained in the Great Books with the aim of entering into the conversation of the authors with one another over the centuries.

The following are the main elements of the New Gelati Curriculum:

1.    Great Books Seminar – twice weekly sessions, for eight semesters.
2.    Language Tutorial – 3 classes per week, for eight semesters.
3.    Mathematics Tutorial – 3 classes per week, six semesters.
4.    Lab course – 2 classes per week, six semesters.
5.    Music – 2 classes per week, two semesters.
6.    Economics – 2 classes per week, 3 semesters (including 7 modules)
7.    Computer science – 2 classes per week, one semester
8.    Law, Government & Politics program – 3 classes per week, three semesters
9.    History & Geography – 2 classes per week, two semesters
10. Theology – 2 classes per week, one semester
11. Leadership Course – 2 classes per week, one semester
12. Organization change management – 2 classes per week, one semester
13. Internships – 2 eight week periods of full-time employment off campus, one in thefirst semester of the 3rd year, the other in the first semester of the 4th year.
14. Public Lecture – once per week

If you would like to learn more about the New Gelati program and each course please download the PDF version of the full New Gelati Program Description here.