Humanities 1
This course will be broken down into 3 large segments focusing on:
Big History and Mythos
(the history of the cosmos from beginning to end)
A principal point of this course will be to teach students to write and interpret written prose, poetry, and academic articles well.
The Elements of Style provides a good set of guidelines for reference.
Students will study the development of mythologies (in the most general sense of the word), the rise and acculturation of religions, and the influence and elementary contents of philosophy. They will gain an understanding of how the complex web of culture gives rise to scientific breakthroughs, religious and philosophical discourse, and artistic developments.
Students will have roughly 10-15 pages of assigned reading every day amounting to 4000-5000 pages of high quality literature and nonfiction reading in their first year. They will engage with the reading assignments via writing exercises and class discussion. We will try to be as transparent as possible with what they will be reading and looking at. We feel it’s important that parents participate in this discussion and help contextualize things for their children.
Additionally, students will be exposed to great works of art such as sculpture, paintings, film, music, and even video games that will thematically complement the written material. It will not be reasonable to generate a complete list of this material (especially as new great works are being generated all the time!), but we will try to keep a modestly updated list here.