I've always wanted to take many courses, develop many skills, and expand my knowledge in many frontiers. This feeling of inadequacy has been present for a long time in my life - and I now look forward to combating it.
I want to be very knowledgable in political science, so that I have a deep knowledge of how societies function. I also want to understand how humans function - the field of psychology. In political science, I want a diverse mix of political thought - secular, Christian, Muslim, Indian, Chinese, and much more. Philosophically - I want an introduction to major philosophers across cultures, and more importantly, I want to develop my skills in philosophical thinking. This is a very skill oriented bit, unlike psychology, which is very fact oriented. Political science is a lot of both.
How am I going to do this? I'm formulating an entire degree - just like PPE, the famous Philosophy, Politics, and Economics degree - only I’m replacing the economics with psychology.
There are inherently two areas here - knowledge and application. Both are extremely important - and most people fail to apply and almost always don't preserve their knowledge. To do both, I need to be quite sharp and evaluate my progress often. This is especially true as this is obviously not a conventional, spoon-fed, theory. Spoon feeding is not inherently bad - I fear that I’m missing out a lot without help from professors,
Other skills too are important - this degree is somewhat like a liberal arts degree. I want a complete overview of both global and Indian history. I want to develop my writing and speaking - so one mandatory course in Rhetoric.
I’m planning to do it over two years - which is rather heavy.
Formulation
Let's get a little more clear about this. A Yale BA Political Science degree, non-intensive, requires 12 courses. Same for psych. That means, ideally, I'd like 24 courses in these fields.
In Oxford, there is both PPE and HP. Unfortunately, I want both - but I believe my concentration is in PPE, as designated by this degree. The HP degree requires writing an essay a week - a great idea, as I see it. This sort of degree is very largely dependent on discussion - so I have to find a way around that. Three weeks into it, I admit that I still haven’t found it - and my blog is spotty. But more on that later.
After a bit of thought, I decided that to complete this degree, I'll require 40 courses - and one final thesis, along with 2 end of term essays in each subject. Pretty heavy, right? Makes it all the more worthwhile.
We will have 8 courses in politics and psychology, and philosophy and three in history. Three in religion. That’s thirty in “core fields”. We will have five in technique: writing, logic, public speaking. The other five will be planned later.
Of course, this is merely a rough draft.
As I want to complete this degree over two years, there will be four semesters. That is, ten courses every semester.
Practical
As mentioned above, keeping the information is hard enough - but it’s not something I haven’t dealt with before.
How can I make this useful in the real world? That’s a far harder question. I’m a good student - and due to how most modern education systems are, that’s just being able to understand and recall concepts and throw them out in the exam paper. Even “practicals” are gamed. That’s definitely not how I want the PPP Project to be.
Put more blandly, one of my worst fears of this degree is that it's extremely academic. I believe for education to be useful, it should affect my life profoundly. Last time I checked, people who took official degrees, even in the humanities, weren't really affected much. They were leaky uninterested buckets who came out older and more worn than they entered.
One idea I had was real world debate. I decided to require 25 hours of active debate for the degree completion. Out of this, I want 10 hours to be live - that is, without prior preparation - gulp. Out of this, I want one hour to be actual contest oriented - on a public stage.
Again, it sounds quite hard, especially when I’m doing this unofficially - but one can only try.
The second idea I had was a political/philosophical blog - and that’s why you’re here, my friend! This is Human Politics and Childish Philosophy - part of my attempt to make a better degree. (Yeah, I’ll have a bit of psychology too).
How Can You Help Me
This title irks me a little bit - because why would you even want to help me? Most people rightly wouldn’t.
Here is a way that you can help me without even trying too, though: start a learning program yourself, and tell me about it here. That’ll motivate me tremendously - and hopefully, my public logging here will motivate you too.
However, if you have knowledge in these areas - if you’re an educator, for example - it would be awesome if you could give some feedback. Any feedback.
I (as of now) have two sections on this blog: the main blog itself, wherein I write my opinions, thoughts, and analyses, and The PPP Project. In the latter, I post assignments and “neviews” - a combination of review and notes - learning occurs far better when you interact with the material. If you could could drop your thoughts below these, I genuinely am thankful to you.
If you aren’t formally educated, then just commenting on my posts - especially if you disagree with me - would help. All types of feedback, even on the degree itself, is appreciated! After all, the purpose of this blog and the degree is to expand my horizons and develop my thinking - not to stay cooped up within my world. And, if we get into a debate, that’ll count toward my debate goal!
This is one of those minor favors - but if you subscribe and/or share, it’ll help my motivation. However, please don’t unless you’re genuinely interested. I don’t want to be yet another spammer of useless ideas, a contributor to your already bloated inbox and world.
In the next two yours, you should (hopefully - I think I won’t quit!) hear a lot about the PPP Project on this publication. Thank you, and I hope you consider starting your own learning program! As always, let me know if you’d like more information.