Grade Levels. Socratic Discussions are offered 3rd-8th grade online classes (which meet every week online, for 40 minutes to 1 hour depending on the grade level); Great Books discussions are the high school and college level online discussions (which meet weekly for two hours, September through May). The readings for the Socratic Discussions are short (1-3 pages), pithy texts from the classics; the readings for the Great Books discussions are the Great Books themselves or very substantial excerpts.
Our live, Socratic Discussion classes occasionally use short excerpts from our Good Books and Great Books lists, but also many other short readings. It is not a whole book discussion class, as the Great Books classes are. The object is to teach the liberal art of dialectics (speaking and listening, about a text, logically, not reading per se, though of course these is a little reading involved.