Roman Helmet Guy@romanhelmetguy
Ok here’s my proposal: If someone gave me the money to start a university there, every undergrad would learn the exact same thing: History & Math. One track for everyone. No electives. Why? Because if you know enough history and you know enough math, understanding anything else becomes trivial. And by teaching just a single track, this could be done for dirt cheap.
For history, the first year should just be reading 50k pages written during the Ancient period, second year 50k pages from the Medieval period, third year 50k pages from the Early Modern period, and fourth year 50k pages from the Modern period. Professors would give daily lectures to structure and synthesize the day’s readings. In the course of this history instruction, students would ofc read the theological, philosophical, and ideological works that drove much of history. And they would debate these ideas to learn rhetoric and become skillful writers and speakers.
For math, the standard math major is already somewhat decent, but there would be just one rigorous track for everyone: an intense course load that covers both theoretical and applied, and with enough probability and information theory etc to understand AI. In the course of instruction, practical applications to engineering, physics, coding etc would be taught alongside.
Anybody who went through that curriculum would be perfectly positioned to understand anything. All hard sciences are downstream of math, and all social sciences are downstream of history. With all the advances in the past 500 years, consider this my proposal for a modern trivium: a base layer of knowledge that any truly learned person must be expected to master, before going on to specialize in a specific field.
And the benefit of running a university this way is that it’s very cheap. Theoretically you could do it with just 2 professors: one for history, one for math. They could each teach 4 courses: each year’s course in a 2 hour block every day. History Year 1-4, and Math Year 1-4. Also, every upper year student is qualified to TA every lower year class. And of course, if we had the money, we could hire more professors to teach these 8 courses to reduce the workload. 4 professors teaching 2 courses each would be a nice balance.
A typical student’s day could be for example: a 2 hour block for History instruction, a 2 hour block for Math instruction, and the rest of the day for studying.
If you enrolled just 100 students a year and they each paid just $25k for tuition and board, that’s $2.5M a year to pay just 2-4 professors and maintain the handful of buildings needed.
And if we taught 100 smart students a year this way, I’m convinced they’d conquer the world. There are approximately zero people alive today who have the comprehensive knowledge of history needed to master the humanities AND the comprehensive knowledge of math needed to master STEM. They would be in a league of their own.
