Curriculum as Manifesto

Amidst the echoing calls proclaiming the end of times that overlap and jostle with the daily directives and imperatives from the workplace and the marketplace to keep things ticking, I have read some of the best writing and I have seen some of the best films, and I have had some of the best conversations strolling through Valencia's carrers cuadriculados, Madrid's ups and downs, and even across screens. The flowers are blossoming much too soon and I with them.

I also can't seem to get rid of this mania of associating everything with everything, Italo Calvino with Thomas Nagel, Simone Weil with E.M. Foster and the Dalai Lama. I keep coming back to these constellations that form in my mind, that link together disparate pieces of humanity and that I can't help but find beautiful. And I have fun picking up each piece, turning it over, admiring it, and then placing it next to another, and then switching the order around, as if they were cards shuffled into a deck. Or the stones and sea shells that make up my rock collection.

A polaroid picture of rocks and shells on a tile floor
Fig 1. A constellation.

I have often heard that academics dislike teaching because it takes time away from research, but I can't imagine anything funner than having the freedom to put together a curriculum. Now, freedom might be the key word here, since many professors and instructors are instead compelled to teach things following a pre-ordained sequence: 19th Century British Literature, World History, Introduction to Astronomy. In his essay, "The Loss of Creature", Walker Percy posits that this sort of classroom setting is destined to kill any of the life and spark within the subject of study. And maybe that's true when lessons and their contents are stuffed together into a semester without care. But I also believe a curriculum can be such a powerful vector for discovery, play, and reflection. There are some curriculums that, like picking up a pair of binoculars or looking through a microscope for the very first time, have changed my life.

When I was seventeen, I chose where to do my undergraduate studies because of a curriculum. As lost as I was at the time, I sensed that there was something special about the year-long residential Structured Liberal Education (SLE). Over a decade later, I continue to revisit the films, books, poems, and essays that I discussed, skimmed, loved, barely understood that composed the SLE curriculum. It's a program that has been critiqued and questioned with cause. But, I have never found SLE's Western European focus to be a reason to shut it down, but rather it is a reason to make many more and different SLEs that feature other texts, other films, other faiths. A curriculum will always be exclusionary and limited and incomplete. I have seen many excellent teachers agonize over this—how to balance the quantity of reading, the limited time of a semester, the almost boundless scope of any truly interesting subject matter, the obligation to evaluate and grade. In my ideal curriculum, I would start by discarding the element of evaluation/grading and then, I would consider that which is perceived to be a weakness (i.e., the limitations imposed by time and attention) to be instead the strength of the lesson plan. Crafting a great curriculum really is an exercise in curation, like setting up an exhibition in a museum or gallery. These limitations, where we decide to start and stop, are what make a journey possible. And there should never be just one type of journey in life, but many different sort of journeys, charted by all sorts of people.

The curriculum that has been coming together in my mind over the course of the first weeks of 2026 has a lot to do with technological angst of our times. It was not something I set out to do when I picked up the novels and essays and fragments that have inspired me, which is why I also think it is a curriculum that quickly outgrows the concerns of the times and invites the type of questions that all great works of art contain within them, which are the unanswerable ones.

Driven Out of Our Minds: a mini-curriculum for 2026 and beyond
(work in progress)

- Andrea