In the early 1970s, as many eminent Catholic colleges began to detach learning from the Church’s traditional principles, a small group of scholars in California formulated a new vision for liberal arts education. Instead of textbooks and lectures, students would read and discuss canonical Western texts within the framework of doctrine and philosophy. Jumping off from Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books” ideal (see St. John’s College) and the Socratic method, these educators started Thomas Aquinas College. Their founding document, entitled “A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education,” states: “The view that liberal education begins in wonder and aims at wisdom—that is, a knowledge of an order which human reason does not create but can discover and understand—has by and large been replaced by the notion that such an education aims at a kind of cultural enrichment, so that the primary focus of study becomes the works and inventions of man rather than the larger order of which he is a part.”