Earlier this week, I read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto for the first time. Published in 1764, it’s widely considered the first gothic novel, the cornerstone of a genre that would include future works like those of the Brontë sisters, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and eventually all of modern horror. I love ghost stories and Southern gothic literature, and I really love October, so at the beginning of the month I sat down with a few undergraduate syllabi and wrote up a reading list for myself that would trace the gothic genre from its origins in the Romantic period, across the Atlantic and into the American South, and up to the present day.
This is the kind of freelance Try Hard energy that is unfortunately woven into the core of my identity; it is who I am and why I am that way. But over the last year, I’ve noticed a lot of online content featuring people—usually young women—outlining their own “personal syllabi,” which, like mine, are self-created and self-guided courses of study on narrow topics with varying degrees of rigor.
As the prospect, more than the reality, of artificial intelligence looms over my livelihood and many others, and the rich and powerful continue to delegitimize and defund the liberal arts, I have been asking myself what the purpose of learning is, and searching for places to see it manifested in real life and online. That, in turn, led me to try to create such a space in my own life.
The high number of personal curricula on my feeds could certainly be because my social media algorithms detected that I was searching for syllabi and trawling Project Gutenberg for 300-year-old novels, or because it simply knows what kind of girl I am, which is: annoying about reading.
Some of these people come dangerously close to the kind of “doing my own research” rhetoric that inevitably leads a person down an RFK Jr.-style rabbit hole; others approach their syllabi with a neoliberal hustle mindset that sees every spare hour of the day as a potential resource to be monetized, and that is gross to me. I wish them all good luck in their studies, but I’m not talking about those people. There’s an even smaller group that seems to be sincerely interested in learning independently, and trying to do it in an organized and thoughtful way.
It feels bad to call “reading books” or “being curious” a trend, and I realize that I’m veering dangerously close to doing exactly that. But that’s not what I mean. There’s a certain kind of person who leaves school and wishes it had never ended—the kind who gets off on buying fancy notebooks, got unreasonably into bullet journaling at some point in the last decade, and almost certainly identified as “a Hermione” before J.K. Rowling outed herself as a transphobe. And I’m going to say right now, for better and for worse, that I am one of them.
To be clear, I do not think this is a cute way to be; some of the most annoying people I’ve met are the kind who seem to have a fetish for their books as physical objects and spend more time on the appearance of reading than actually reading. Generally, I think that the more a person makes a thing of their love of reading or learning, the less time you can expect that they actually spend doing that. This is the kind of person who will sheepishly admit they’re considering grad school because they like the idea of reading books all day. Unfortunately for them, the experience of grad school is now more computer-oriented in almost every discipline than it used to be.
The instances of this autodidacticism that I find less cringey and more admirable are the ones that engage less with the aesthetics of learning and more with the actual work of it, complete with link-outs to readings and discussion sections. I've enjoyed following newsletter-based syllabi like Lit Girl's "terms" on fame and games, for example, or Bliss Foster's video essays about fashion and culture. There is so much pretending to read and performance of thought on social media that a prompt to actually do the reading and thinking felt refreshing. And the prospect of actually doing that work had its own appeal, and its own rewards.
As those in power continue to worship and leverage all things algorithmic and attempt to make “learning” the domain of machines rather than brains, a Luddite-adjacent aesthetic has taken hold among a subset of young people. It may not quite rise to the level of resistance—and it is admittedly tough to square Luddite instincts with the reality of TikTok as it exists—but it's perhaps a way to cope with an increasing sense of futility surrounding intellectualism. If the machines are being put to use doing the thinking and reasoning and knowing for you, then simply smash (or just put down) the machines.
The term “Luddite” comes from the 19th-century protests of textile workers who raided English factories and destroyed the automatic sewing machines that would take their jobs. These protests were often violent clashes between workers and management, a labor conflict that feels increasingly relevant as the work that machines can do has grown from simple mechanical tasks to creative ideation and even what some of your less discerning Silicon Valley bros deem passable “art.” To them, it might well be that, just as the text generated by a large language model would look like writing to someone who doesn’t value writing as anything beyond a succession of words filling a page.
I’ve been thinking about this New York Magazine article about these new AI-driven Alpha schools for days; apparently, growing numbers of the computer-oriented elite believe that school needs to be disrupted, and that their children’s most crucial learning years should be spent as guinea pigs.
What that means in practice is that kids in these schools receive a fraction of the academic instruction they would get in a traditional classroom, and that their learning is moderated by an AI-powered app that allows them to move at their own pace. Their coaches (crucially, not “teachers”) are trained to help move them through the apps, but aren’t subject matter experts on their own. The work of school, in this case, is reduced to tapping through an app that tracks their eyeball movements and prompts them to pay attention if it senses they’re starting to get distracted—a machine-driven, machine-monitored process in which the human is prompted and pushed to behave in an ever more machine-like way.
The rest of their school days are filled with, uh, other stuff: starting and running a YouTube channel, competing in a Chopped-style cooking competition, and some physical exercise. The balance of types of learning alone indicates the decreased emphasis on the sort of pedagogical structures that composed the types of education most American adults received in public schools, and raises the question that Benjamin Wallace asks in his article: “Do children even need to know things anymore?”
Other questions follow from that: Should they get to learn? Why would they want to, if the answers are all already available and can be delivered with a single click?
Of course, knowing an answer is different than understanding it, and possessing some supposed answer key is not the same thing as the contented mastery that is won from the boundless interrogation required of a life of constant learning. When you believe that learning is only as useful as the facts you have collected and categorized, and that empirical truth that can be coded and served back through a sycophantic chat interface, you have already surrendered the best part of learning. The friction that occurs between an individual and the wide world is what creates new ideas, and the pleasure of finding a new way of seeing and understanding that world. An education concerned primarily with the acquisition of facts is one that prepares its students to be bored in a small, closed world. It’s not just passive, it is fundamentally scared.
I see the impulse to create a self-guided curriculum, whatever its other Hermione-scented issues, as a quixotic grasp at coping with the shrinking of the world. It’s an attempt to press on its walls and resist its shrinkage. If you’re a little annoying in the process, so be it.
