Spring enrollment is open · See the catalog
Live online classes for the next generation.
Odysseus Lyceumly·SEE·um/laɪˈsiːəm/ brings students together (ages 5 to 18) with exceptional teachers for live classes in Western civilization, American civics, great books, economics, rhetoric, conservative thought, literature, art, character, and more.
Free classes available · Scholarships for every family who needs one
Our courses are built around live conversation, not passive video. Ask questions. Join the discussion. Know your teacher. Know your classmates.
Miss a meeting when life gets in the way, and you can catch up with the recording. But at Odysseus, being there matters, and the record says so. Every attendance list, every parent dashboard, and every reward in the platform preserves the difference between having been present and having watched later.
Attendance record · Conservative Thought I
Attended live
Full attendance credit · 100 Lyceum Points · progress toward a tuition reward
Recording viewed
Completion credit · 20 Lyceum Points · recorded as a recording, never as attendance
Five live meetings in a row unlocks a tuition discount. Finish a seminar primarily live and a free class, scholarship credit, or a Lyceum badge opens up.
From Democracy in America to the Federalist Papers, from logic and rhetoric to economics and American art, Odysseus gives young people the opportunity to study ideas in depth with teachers who believe our intellectual inheritance is worth understanding.
Our editorial posture
Courses may openly approach their subjects from a conservative perspective, but they must be intellectually serious rather than propagandistic. Students encounter arguments, primary sources, historical context, competing interpretations, and genuine criticism.
The goal is not false neutrality. The goal is academic seriousness.
A course on Rush Limbaugh can be favorable toward his contribution to American conservatism while also examining criticism of his methods, rhetoric, and legacy.
A course on Thomas Jefferson teaches the Declaration and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as the achievements they are, and does not skip the contradictions in the man who wrote them.
A student studying constitutionalism reads the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. A student studying Adam Smith reads Smith. Commentary comes after the text, never instead of it.
A year spent reading a serious book can be worth more than dozens of disconnected hours. Rather than a lesson about a great work, students spend a semester or a year reading the work itself with a qualified instructor.
Alexis de Tocqueville · The year-long seminar · Ages 15–18
A semester or year-long guided reading seminar: democracy, equality, religion, associations, local government, individualism, majority rule, and the American character. Forty pages a week, discussed live every Tuesday with eleven other students.
Also reading this term
A whole-book seminar · Imani Bell
Three essays, six weeks · Imani Bell
Selections, read closely · Thomas Ward
“A student studying constitutionalism reads the Constitution. A student studying Smith reads Smith.”
Primary-source bias, throughout the catalog
The same book runs at more than one level, so a twelve-year-old and a seventeen-year-old are each reading at a depth that is actually theirs. Other seminar authors this year include Burke, Locke, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Sowell, Kirk, Lewis and Chesterton.
The Lyceum leads with the subjects it has a genuine reason to teach. Everything here is taught live, from sources, by instructors vetted on the material itself.
The tradition, read closely
Burke, Kirk, Hayek, Friedman, Sowell, Buckley and the arguments they were making, studied as intellectual history, with their critics in the room.
6 categoriesOne book. Read whole.
Semester and year-long seminars in which students read a serious work cover to cover and discuss it live, forty pages at a time.
6 categoriesAthens, Rome, Jerusalem
The long inheritance: Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christianity and the West, the Enlightenment, and the art and literature that carried them.
6 categoriesDocuments before verdicts
Colonial settlement through the twentieth century, taught from primary sources and competing interpretations rather than a single narrative.
6 categoriesHow it actually works
Institutions, elections, courts, federalism, and citizenship, taught as ideas and mechanisms, never as electioneering.
6 categoriesRead the document itself
The Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, and the live disagreements about how to read them.
6 categoriesTradeoffs, all the way down
Price theory, the Austrian and Chicago traditions, public choice, and a serious treatment of capitalism’s critics.
6 categoriesArgument as a skill
Formal and informal reasoning, validity, fallacies, and the discipline of saying exactly what you mean.
6 categoriesSay it so it lands
Classical rhetoric, speech composition, and competitive debate, including the requirement to argue the side you do not hold.
6 categoriesHabits before opinions
Courage, temperance, justice, prudence and the practical question of what kind of person a student is becoming.
6 categoriesLandscape, monument, portrait
American landscapes, monuments, historical painting, presidential portraiture and Revolutionary-era art, studied and then made.
6 categoriesExpanding
Mathematics, science, coding, languages, music, general art, writing, tutoring and test prep open as the student body grows. The long-term aim is to cover a family’s whole supplementary education in one place.
Points accumulate for showing up, finishing what you started, reading the whole thing, and being worth listening to. They convert into tuition discounts, free classes, and scholarship credit.
And completing the core curriculum (conservative thought, Western civilization, American political thought, economics) earns credit redeemable for mainstream academic classes like Intro to Python or Geometry Workshop.
How rewards workAttended live
100 points
Full attendance credit and a live mark on the record. The family balance gets 100 matching points too.
Watched the recording
20 points
Completion credit so nobody falls behind, recorded clearly as a recording, never as attendance.
Five live in a row
Streak reward
Bonus points for the student and, matched, for the family. The streak shows on both the student wallet and the parent dashboard.
A seminar finished live
400 points
Completing a seminar primarily live earns a badge and 400 points, matched in the family balance, where 2,400 points cover a free one-time class.
You hold genuine authority over your children’s education here. Transparency is not a setting you have to find. It is how the Lyceum is built.
Every direct message, board post, and attachment involving your child sits in one Child Communications screen. Your child cannot switch it off.
Parents, stepparents, grandparents, tutors, each with the permissions you choose, and a log of every change.
Instructional hours, grades, and credits accumulate quietly. Generate a verified PDF transcript whenever you need one.
Identity verification and background checks before an instructor ever meets a student. No exceptions, no hidden channels.
Scholarships are built into the product as a credit of their own, applied for in your parent account, reviewed by our team, and redeemed at checkout like any other credit.
Points are earned. Scholarships are granted. Both produce tuition credit, and the platform keeps them distinct so a family always knows which is which.
A portion of the catalog is free and stays free, including a five-week character seminar we would like every family to try before they spend anything.
Ratings on this platform are dual-track: students and parents review separately, and the two numbers are never blended.
“We had spent two years assembling a curriculum out of spare parts. This is the first thing that felt like an actual school, with an actual teacher who knows my daughter’s name.”
“We read Tocqueville. The whole thing. Not a summary, not a slide deck. The actual book, forty pages a week, and then we argued about it for an hour every Tuesday.”
“I can read every message any teacher has ever sent my son. I did not have to ask for that, and I did not have to configure it. It was just how it was built.”
“My instructor made me argue the other side of the case in front of everyone. I was annoyed for about a day and then it was the most useful thing I did all year.”
“I have taught in three schools. This is the first place that asked me whether I actually understood Burke, not whether I agreed with him.”
“The transcript came out as a real PDF with instructional hours and grades on it. My oldest used it in her college application file.”
Begin
Create a parent account in two minutes, add your children, and browse a catalog filtered to each child: right ages, right grades, right times, in your time zone.
