Our Tradition

People have always taught themselves. What they rarely did was teach themselves alone.

Your Reading Journey is built on an old idea: that serious readers, meeting regularly in small groups, keep each other going. We borrowed the idea, and many of our practices, from a club Benjamin Franklin founded in Philadelphia almost three hundred years ago.

The Junto

In the autumn of 1727, Franklin, then a 21-year-old printer, gathered about ten of his friends into what he called “a club of mutual improvement.” They named it the Junto, from the Spanish junta, meaning a meeting or assembly. (It has nothing to do with the later sense of a military government.)

The members were not scholars. They were a copier of legal documents, a self-taught mathematician, a surveyor, a shoemaker, a joiner, a merchant’s clerk: working people with curious minds. They met on Friday evenings, first in a tavern and later in a room of their own.

Franklin drew up the rules:

• Each member, in turn, brought questions on morals, politics or natural philosophy for the group to discuss. Questions were read a week in advance, so members came having read and thought about them.
• Every three months, each member wrote an essay on any subject he pleased and read it to the group.
• Discussion was to be conducted “in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory.” Over time, flat contradiction and dogmatic assertions were banned outright, with a small fine for anyone who slipped.

Every meeting opened with a set of standing queries, twenty-four questions read aloud and answered by anyone with something to offer. The first was: “Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto?” Others asked about worthy actions witnessed, good ideas heard and how the Junto might help a member with “any of your honourable designs.”

A new member stood, laid a hand on his breast, and answered four questions. Did he bear any particular disrespect to a current member? Did he love mankind in general, “of what profession or religion soever”? Should anyone be harmed “for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship”? And did he love truth for truth’s sake?

What Came of It

The Junto met for nearly forty years. Franklin called it “the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that then existed in the province,” because preparing for each meeting made members read with attention, and its rules gave them “better habits of conversation.”

Two things it did are worth knowing, because we have learned from both.

It pooled its books. Members brought the books they could spare to their meeting room so each could use all of them. It worked for a while, but without anyone to care for the collection it fell apart, and after about a year everyone took their books home. Franklin’s answer was the Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), one of the first subscription libraries in America. Personal collections came first; the shared library grew out of them.

It grew by copying itself. When more people wanted to join, Franklin argued against making the club larger. Instead, each member was invited to start a new club with the same rules. Five or six were formed, with names like the Vine, the Union and the Band.

Others Who Did the Same

The Junto was one example of an idea that keeps coming back:

• Mutual improvement societies in 19th-century Britain, where working men and women met to read, debate and teach one another.
• The Lyceum movement, founded in 1826, which spread local study and lecture groups across America.
• The Chautauqua movement, begun in 1874, whose home-reading circle enrolled adults across the country in a four-year course of study.
• The Great Books discussion groups of the 1940s and 50s, in which ordinary readers met to discuss the classics together.

Each found the same thing: people keep learning when they learn in company.

Why Now?

It has never been easier to learn, or harder to keep learning.

The old model is finished. For most of the last century, education was a phase of life: you learned when you were young, then you worked. That model does not survive a knowledge economy. Careers now depend on knowledge and a broad range of skills, and both change faster than any degree can keep up with. What you learned in school or college will not carry you through the rest of your life. People live longer, too, with decades of active mind ahead of them after their careers peak. Learning has to continue, and it only continues when it is challenged.

AI raises the stakes. Knowledge that once sustained a career is now being done by machines. But when information becomes cheap, judgment becomes precious: the ability to understand, to weigh evidence, to spot a weak argument and to ask a good question. You can only check what a machine tells you if you know enough to doubt it. The greater risk is not being replaced but handing over our thinking until we lose the habit of doing it ourselves. Reading seriously and arguing with real people is how we keep that habit.

Access was never the problem. Lectures are free, books are cheap and the world’s libraries are a search away. Yet most people who set out to learn alone stop. In one large study of online courses from MIT and Harvard, only about 3 percent of participants finished the course they started. What is missing is not material but direction, discipline and company. This site began as one person’s attempt to educate himself alone. After six years it had grown difficult. Learning alone lacks the motivation, the excitement and the new ideas that only other readers bring.

More is at stake than careers.

• Friendship. In 2023 the US Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic, reporting that about half of American adults experience it. Many of the clubs, societies and gathering places where adults once made friends have faded. A Junto is a friendship with a reason to meet.
• Attention. The share of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Reading a whole book, and talking about it seriously, has become a quietly countercultural act.
• Citizenship. The founding generation educated itself in order to govern itself. In a polarised age, disagreeing in good faith with people you respect is a civic skill, and it has to be practised.
• Breadth. Careers reward narrow specialisation. A broad, self-chosen course of reading is how you become someone who can connect one field to another.
• A life well used. Some things are worth knowing for their own sake. Franklin asked every new member whether he loved truth for truth’s sake. It is still the right question.

So we return to the oldest answer. Small groups, a regular rhythm and real people who know you, notice what you are reading and disagree with you to your face. This is the one thing a machine cannot do for you. The Junto is more relevant now than it was in 1727, not less.

What We Kept

• Small groups. A Junto here is a dozen people or fewer, so everyone knows everyone.
• A regular rhythm. Every Junto meets on a schedule it chooses, because rhythm is what keeps reading going.
• Standing questions. Before each meeting, members are asked a short set of questions in the Junto’s spirit: what have you read that’s worth sharing, what question are you bringing, is there a book you would recommend, how can the group help you?
• The quarterly essay. Every member writes one piece a quarter and shares it with their Junto.
• Four principles. Franklin’s members stood, hand on heart, and answered four questions. We skip the ceremony but keep the substance. Joining means agreeing to:
  1. Respect the people; argue with the ideas.
  2. Welcome everyone, whatever their background, work or beliefs.
  3. Never penalise anyone for their opinions.
  4. Seek the truth, not victory.
• Growth by new groups, not bigger ones. When a Junto is full, a member can found another.
• A shared shelf. Each Junto will keep a shelf of books its members recommend, drawn from their own reading journeys.

What We Changed

• Anyone invited is welcome. The original Junto was a club of men. Ours is open to anyone a member invites.
• Nothing is secret. The first Junto kept its existence quiet, and its offshoot clubs were not told they were connected to it. Every Junto here knows what it belongs to.
• No fines. We hope for courtesy in discussion as earnestly as Franklin did, but we leave out the penalties.
• Its founder was a man of his time. Franklin enslaved people for much of his life and only late in life became an abolitionist. We honour the club he founded without pretending its founder was without fault.

Join the Tradition

The Junto’s question is still the best way to start: have you read anything lately worth sharing?