International Honors (IHON) Program
PLU’s International Honors Program (IHON) is a unique honors program that focuses not on teaching you about things, but instead on cultivating your ability to learn, think for yourself, and express yourself.
In IHON, you’ll study and consider perspectives from various pasts about crucial questions of human life: What is a human? How should human animals relate to nature, including other animals? For what should we live? Do we ‘know’ what we see? Does the universe have a purpose? Does human history have a direction? What is ‘home’?
IHON is also an alternate way to satisfy your general education requirements at PLU. Instead of taking classes offered by specific academic departments, you’ll take courses designed just for IHON, around problems or questions, using diverse methods and ways of thinking.
IHON is for any student in any major – you don’t need to have taken honors classes in high school to be successful in IHON! As long as you have the commitment to work hard, read a lot, and grow intellectually, IHON is for you!
Contrary to most teaching techniques, no one will tell you what to think or how to feel about the texts you read in IHON – you are left to draw your own conclusions which are to be discussed with the class. However, don’t confuse the freedom of thought with neglect. IHON professors have specific guidelines on how to approach texts from different eras and cultures. They want you to be able to attune yourself to the text and make a mental separation of what you were taught to believe versus what it is that you are working with.