On Personal Curriculae, pt.1
Alas! I have been influenced!
I have often found myself, as I’m sure many other have too, having grand notions of the things I should and want to know: books to read, topics to research, languages to learn and much more. However, even more often, I find myself either too distractedly busy or disorganisedly free that, even when I am perfectly able to apply myself, I don’t. Perhaps for fatigue, for not knowing what it is that I want dedicate my afternoon too, for wanting so much all at once that, in overwhelm, I do nothing. Certainly, with interviews and my preferred universities hopefully drawing ever closer, this mode of being is utterly unsustainable. I refuse to play the dunce or lesser being, so resolved to do something.
Seeing a number of swaying arguments through instagram and co (although I refuse to get tiktok, abstaining morally), I found particular inspiration in the videos of Glutenbergbible and Ruby Granger. Thus, I have decided to device my own personal curriculum. Much like the guiding hand of the schools’ syllabus, I intend or it to, ultimately, get my act together and learn!
However, I am very cognisant of the fact that beyond a personal curriculum of my own devising - I still do have multiple and full curriculums to plow through
In my ponderings, deciding between Petronius or Marlowe; Auden or Horace; Wagner or Korsakov, the process of decision, evaluation and ordering to be a meditative and deeply introspective task. For despite its guise as a task exceeding and reconstructing the confines of myself to beyond its current iteration, it relied on my understanding of not only who or what I currently see myself as being, but my prescience of who I wanted to become, thus the act making itself the guiding hand of the sculpting mason.
And yet, in this act of devising, I realise I am not alone, nor even particularly novel. The personal curriculum has a history far older than my own little desk-bound schemes, stretching back through centuries of readers and thinkers who assembled their own courses of study like mosaics, pieced from what the world denied or withheld. Petrarch, wandering libraries and ruins, gathered his humanism from the scattered letters of Cicero, teaching himself a past that seemed both lost and still alive. Christine de Pizan, moving against the grain of a culture that allowed her no place in its universities, read herself into a tradition that had excluded her, and from that reading wrote herself into permanence. Frederick Douglass, denied literacy by law, scavenged scraps of newspapers and speeches until their words became his own arsenal. Mary Wollstonecraft, impatient with the narrow education offered to women, set herself a syllabus of philosophy, history, and political theory, that she might re-imagine what it meant to think as a woman.
Nor were these solitary figures alone in their solitude. Franklin sketched reading lists for his ‘junto,’ a self-improvement society held together by the electricity of shared learning. Across industrial Britain, the Mechanics’ Institutes and Penny Universities turned evenings into classrooms, where factory hands carried Homer and Euclid in their lunch-pails and forged syllabuses together by candlelight. To devise a curriculum has always been more than to draft a timetable: it is to declare one’s refusal of imposed ignorance, to carve out a shape for one’s mind when the surrounding world offers only templates of silence or servitude.
To glimpse this lineage is to see my own scribbled list as something more than a private fancy. It is to join a tradition of self-fashioning through study, where the syllabus becomes not merely an external order of books but a mirror in which to discern who one is, and a map toward who one dares to become.
Ultimately, being in the throws of application season and despite my craving to study Milton (I’ll save it for over Christmas), I settled on a complete recap of the Classical, ie. making sure I actually know what I’m talking about and deserve to be applying for and studying Classics.