alt Hacker NewsI don't know the exact curriculum and I'm sure it's changed over the years, but one of my girlfriends from back in the day really did go to a school that had one like this. St. John's College, which has two campuses in Annapolis, MA and Santa Fe, NM. They had no majors and everyone learns by reading the classics directly. They also have to learn classical Latin and Greek and read many in their original languages. I don't know everything they assigned, but I remember at least they actually did learn geometry by reading Euclid and calculus by reading Newton.
Apparently, the history is that the school lost its accreditation and had to shut down during the Great Depression, so to attract investors and reopen, it adopted an extremely unique identity with no watering down of curriculum and commitment to western classics in an attempt to combat the rise of fascism.
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I heard about St. John's from a twitter thread and find it deeply baffling.
It's as if a group of monks wanted to keep the quadrivium and trivium but their clock stopped at the 16th century. One of their faculty proudly said they study analysis by reading Descartes! Which I thought was a highbrow joke but nope, dead serious.
There's a reason that 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is a thing. Dive into the classics after you have gained the maturity from modern texts.
Take one of the easier problems from Rudin. Prove that a continuous function from the unit interval [0,1] to itself has a fixed point. I wonder how a student immersed in the 'classics' would even begin to tackle this.
They may have learned mechanics by studying Newton but they can’t have learned calculus. Principia includes geometric series and limits etc but given as geometric arguments so you don’t come out of newton’s principia knowing how to do calculus. If they learned the method of fluxions from Newton (which is equivalent to calculus) then I feel very sorry for them missing out on the far better modern presentation of Leibnitz’s calculus that they would get in studying say Spivak or Stewart or any other modern textbook. For the same reason everyone teaches Taylor series (which are fantastically useful) rather than Newton’s wildly inferior series derivation which he used because Taylor series hadn’t been (re)discovered yet.[1]
Euclid isn’t surprising. School children used to learn plane geometry from Euclid until the 1950s or so. I learned geometry at school using a syllabus from Euclid and we learned the modern form of Euclid’s postulates etc but we didn’t study Euclid itself.
[1] Taylor series were developed in the modern form by James Gregory who was trying to reverse engineer how Newton had come up with his series expansions. I say rediscovered above because they were first written down by Madhava of Sangamagrama who gave Taylor series expansions for the trigonometric functions and natural logarithms/exponential function in the 14th century.