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This month we commence our Summer Language Learning Challenge, which is now open to anyone excited to participate under the direct guidance from Prof. Arguelles. If you wish, you can continue with the original plan, and study all four languages using the proposed method. However, you are also free to study any combination of languages using whatever method works best for you. The challenge will center around a weekly meetings with Prof. Arguelles and a small group of likeminded learners on Saturdays at 2 PM Chicago Time (CDT). Given this altered format, the price is also far more affordable.
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Musings From The Professor's Desk
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Educational Reform or Educational Revolution? – Part I
I believe that my Academy represents a real innovation in higher education, but whether it proves to be a reform or a revolution will be borne out by its development over the next few years – that is, whether it will develop as an accredited program in partnership with an established university, or whether it not only continues to operate independently, but inspires the adoption of similar independent learning models.
As many of you know, my background is in academia. Having spent my whole career as a university professor, I cannot but be aware of how universities have been changing in recent times, in a way that can only be characterized as losing sight of their original purpose, if not becoming entirely corrupted. Historically, universities were places for a small but dedicated community of scholars to cultivate a breadth of advanced knowledge. Nowadays, the university is regarded as an entity meant to impart career credentials for the majority of the population. As the perceived mission of the university has changed, so too has academic culture, which has now taken on a slant detrimental to true scholarship: taken for granted are a spirit of hyper-specialization; an unstated obligation to work within certain ideological frameworks; an emphasis on producing jargon-filled articles for niche publications; and, most recently, a requirement to openly espouse various dogmas. In addition, universities have become increasingly expensive for students, even compared to the overall inflation rate, and the education they offer has become increasingly program-specific. Over the coming year or so, I plan to use these newsletters to address each of these issues in turn, interspersed with other topics. Today I will begin by addressing hyper-specialization.
Non-academics may not have a sense of the degree to which hyper-specialization in the humanities has, in many cases, become a caricature of itself. In order to succeed, academics need to establish a reputation for their work in increasingly narrow sub-fields of other sub-fields. A potential dissertation topic, for instance, might be the depiction of female characters in the late novels of Thomas Hardy. The author of that dissertation, though holding a doctorate in English Literature, would nowadays feel restricted to that particular sub-field, feeling unqualified to discuss, say, male characters in the late novels of Thomas Hardy, or female characters in the early novels of Thomas Hardy. Such a scholar would most certainly not feel comfortable discussing any other British novelist of the late 19th century, and the idea of going further afield, even under the umbrella of “English literature,” would (if proposed) be a frightening prospect.
How did this excessive specialization come about? One factor is the gradual hyper-specialization that has occurred in the hard sciences, disciplines where such specialization is arguably both justified and necessary. Specialization in the sciences has produced, and continues to produce, advances and discoveries in many areas, such that we collectively know far more, and can do far more with this knowledge, than people in the past. Centuries ago, it made sense to be a “natural scientist” rather than a physicist, but now, in order to do work on cold atomic gasses, quarks, or bosons, one has to specialize further into particle physics or nuclear physics, and then into sub-fields of those fields, to keep up with new developments and applications.
Given the prestige of the hard sciences, I think “softer” fields like the humanities have been drawn into following a similar model of specialization. However, the scientific model of specialization simply does not apply to these fields. A survey of the history of science reveals any number of quantifiable discoveries and developments – such developments or discoveries in the humanities are far fewer, and the simple fact is that there is no equivalent, say, to a reactor or a space shuttle to be built in literature or philosophy. However, the humanities, in turn, address perennial questions of meaning – what it means to be human – that science alone cannot answer. Thus, as many scholars still acknowledge, interdisciplinary approaches across the sciences and the humanities provide new perspectives on multifaceted issues, and to be able to see analogies and patterns across fields, one needs broad cultural and historical knowledge. Thus, my ideal as a humanist has always been the development of an encyclopedic brain.
In addition to foreign languages and literature, I have always been drawn to philosophy, to religion, to mythology, to the study of dreams, and to history in general – in other words, to the broad spectrum of the humanities. Having immersed myself in all of these fields throughout my lifetime, I am able to see the intricate connections between them, and feel I have much to offer others as a guide to them. Nonetheless, in my professional career I have always been pigeonholed into focusing on just one or the other of these fields at a time. This feeling of constraint made me dream of opening my own academy where I could offer the full range of my knowledge in these fields to anyone who might share these interests. As I wrote in a previous newsletter, this dream has now come true, and I am enormously grateful for this. I know for a fact that there are other scholars in the world who also have a breadth of knowledge to offer, but are held back by institutional restraints. It would be wonderful if the model of my Academy could catch on, allowing scholars who pursue true breadth of knowledge to interact directly with rising generations of like-minded seekers. It has been particularly rewarding to realize that many of the students in my Academy have a background not in the humanities, but in the sciences, and I have found myself wondering if the reverse would be true for a similar online Academy of Math and Sciences. If such an Academy existed, I like to believe that I would enroll as a student – not, perhaps, to grasp all of particle or nuclear physics, but at least to gain a strong grounding in physics as such, and in natural science as a way of seeing the world.
Best regards, Alexander Arguelles
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Meet Ian Aleshkevich-Suslov
Polymath with a degree in radiochemistry, working as a physical chemistry teacher, interested in theoretical physics, sustainable development, neurodivergence, historical linguistics, video games as a narrative medium, metaphysics, theology, and language-learning. Acquired an interest for languages and historical linguistics after learning about the history of writing at the age of 13. Ian studied English, French, and German in school, and Old Church Slavonic, Polish, and Japanese independently; fluent in English, French, German, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese, Latin, and Polish; currently studying Biblical Hebrew and Lithuanian. |
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"I found the approach to language education at schools to be wholly insufficient: a total of 2-3 hours spread out across the workdays; I barely made any progress in English until I started dedicating time to consuming content in English outside of classes, which quickly yielded great results. For the longest time I and many others wondered how and why I managed to make such a breakthrough, but when I came across the Professor’s videos on YouTube in 2018, I found that not only did he share my sentiment about the inadequacy of school programmes, but he also explained how language-learning works, and it matched my experience with English perfectly! Thanks to his videos I managed to make breakthroughs in Norwegian, Ukrainian and Latin, which I had been studying at the time but with little success. Since then I have had a go at a couple dozen languages, and really enjoyed the process of learning them, and I have been doing my best to spread this joy to others as well by telling people of the Professor’s and other polyglots’ approaches and leading by example. I was overjoyed at the Professor’s return to YouTube in 2021, and felt greatly honoured to have been invited to a discussion circle on his channel. When the Academy launched, I jumped at the opportunity to participate in live Latin classes with the Professor, and I greatly enjoyed them. During the classes we speak nothing but Latin, and the participants take turns reading passages aloud from Mediaeval philosophical and literary works. In order to make sure that we understand what we read the Professor has us explain the passage in our own terms, which is a very helpful exercise. After a while of reading we start discussing the philosophical messages in the text, which is the most fun part of the classes for me personally. Arguing from different points of view entirely in spoken Latin is a wonderful challenge that rarely comes up in my day-to-day life, and the addition of the Professor’s sense of humour and his deep and extremely helpful insight into the social and intellectual context of the works in question makes the experience an absolute joy, both emotionally and intellectually. I was consistently surprised at how much more sense Erasmus’s colloquies make when put in their proper context, making me appreciate one of my favourite Mediaeval authors even more! The Professor’s courses are a wealth of fun education for all who are interested in languages and great literature, both ancient and Mediaeval." |
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This month I would like to recommend a classic work that embodies the breadth of learning that I mention in the newsletter. This is Frederick Bodmer’s The Loom of Language, published back in 1944. You may have this as a standard reference work on your shelves, but if you have never really read it, I think that doing so thoroughly would be most rewarding for anyone receiving this newsletter. It contains good general overviews of linguistic categories, the history of writing, and the history of English in particular. Moreover, it makes the argument that it is actually easier and better to learn multiple related languages (i.e., “branches”) simultaneously, and provides word lists and steps for doing so. |
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June Video RecommendationReading Literature in Foreign Languages: Tool, Techniques, Target
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