The high school education I never got

Tweets and threads from @houshuang, in date order · links and handles removed, nothing else changed

2020

16 June 2020

Very similar approach and energy to John Vervaeke (although quite different personality). I did a PhD in education, but have extremely flimsy grip on the classics - slowly building my foundations (never too late!).

2024

8 February 2024

Particulary fascinated by the discussion of Les aventures de Telemaque, which I now want to read - as offering a bridge to the classics. I read voraciously as a child, but I never even touched upon any of the classics, and have only begun as an adult.

28 February 2024

Did you know Ibsen wrote about Roman emperors? The last few years has been a cavalcade of me discovering how incredibly little I know.

In Norway, every school kid reads "A doll's house" in school (maybe the only play we read), and know the music to Peer Gynt...

But what else do we know? Of course, Ibsen wrote many plays, including what he thought of as his life work, something that took 10 years, and was never performed during his life time: Emperor and Galilean.

Trying to find any recorded performances of it on Youtube or our national broadcaster, I just find what looks to be an amazing performance in Utah, and a big show in London 12 years ago. Nothing in Norway :)

5 March 2024

Any good guides for autodidacts who want to get a good grasp of history? I see great discussions online about people learning programming, but also for example ancient Greek. Not just which resources to start with, but how to approach them - which practices to engage with...

Things like "read three beginning AG textbooks in parallel", "spaced repetition", etc. Plus of course the textbooks themselves have a very pedagogical bent (built-in repetition etc). But for history, feels like everyone are "experts" who just want to recommend another cool book.

My context is that at the age of 42, I realized I didn't know almost anything except disconnected snippets before the 1900s... Lot's of names, events, stories, but nothing concrete, connected, meaningful... So I've started systematically building up my knowledge.

The resources I use are not built for new learners (I'm not interested in diving into high school history textbooks etc). Of course I have my own set of practices which I am refining, and which I'm happy to share, but would love to hear others stories...

Not just autodidacts, but professionals - if you had to quickly get up to speed with an area/period you were not at all familiar with (say Indian history the last 2000 years, when you've specialized in Europe) - where would you start? How would you go about it?

23 April 2024

Interesting how quickly MOOCs have become irrellevant... I'm extremely interested in learning, and devote multiple hours a day. I'm currently "catching up" on the classical education I never got - everything from ancient history, Greek and Latin, history of literature...

Tons of stuff where I would benefit from a structured curriculum, and interaction with others. Yet it never even crossed my mind to look up MOOCs. Instead, I'm reading 18th Century books from Archive.org, watching tons of great Youtube videos on how to analyze a poem, how to do grammar translation of Latin, subscribe to some fantastic Substacks, and follow interesting Twitter threads... And if I wanted to really immerse myself in Latin/Greek, there are lot's of Zoom courses by experts for a few hundred dollars, or even full immersion weeks.

Granted, I'm quite good at self-directed learning... but I still have lots of unfulfilled needs, and am probably making it unnecessarily difficult for myself. I just haven't seen any MOOCs or free online learning communities so far that would really help me along.

29 April 2024 · reply

always thought I was happy we didn't read much in school, because I thought analysis would have killed my joy of reading. But now an adult, I feel really short-changed - I never even heard of most of the classics, and certainly got zero support in reading more difficult texts...

7 May 2024

Not to say that a great teacher can't enhance your insights from reading a book, but I really think the goal should be for all high school graduates to be able to read widely and independently and understand. For that, they need a wide range of cultural and historical background.

And it's just a fact that passion-driven learning, and focus on critical thinking, is not going to bring that by itself. Students don't know what they need to know.

Exactly how to best organize both a curriculum and a pedagogy to do that, is still an open question to me.

I say this as a 43 year old, who have always read widely and been precocious, but is finally now beginning to backfill my cultural knowledge - Greek and Roman history, Chaucer, the Islamic conquests, the Renaissance... So much I've read and barely understood because of this lack.

7 May 2024 · reply

I'm churning away on history books - a few hours every evening. In a couch, in front of the fireplace, while my son is doing homework. I'm not taking notes, let alone creating SR cards.

But I'd love if magically I could open my phone and get prompts and questions about yesterdays, last weeks, last months reading... Either designed by the author of the book, or generated automatically.

2025

8 April 2025

I actually spent a week in a "liceo classico" once, and although I was very impressed by the curriculum, the students I was staying were very cynical..

But there are great teachers out there... Same feeling I had when @victoriamoul talked about the number of books her kids had already read by 12, Illiad, Odyssey etc... I was a teacher's pet and a big reader at school, but nobody ever told me this stuff even existed!

15 April 2025

I used to struggle with too many tabs open. Now I keep ordering books through interlibrary loan, I need to follow all their references... Reading literary history is horrible. I need to read Mahomet by Voltaire to understand how he subverted the form of the formal drama to attack the church and the state in France. I need to read the play called "Sturm und Drang" which gave its name to a whole cultural movement in Germany. I need to read the play "El Gran Teatro del Mundo" by Calderon, about how life is but a theatre. ... And so much more!

Well, back to Georg Brandes... until the next distraction or rabbit-hole... :)

Struggling with the trade-off of language study vs other study. I really enjoy language learning, and I immensely benefit from those I already know. I already gain a lot from the smattering of Latin and ancient/modern Greek I know... but to do it seriously takes a lot of time...

And I'm not a student anymore, I might have an hour or two, often fragmented, out of the day to do something focused. I should be spending more time to make progress in the languages, but I also want to read so many classical plays, history books etc...

16 April 2025

I'm really fascinated by all the discussion on my feed about European modernist writers, and the general excitement about new authors... I'm curious - are you reading modern literature because you feel like you've exhausted classical literature, or because you feel like modern literature uniquely addresses the current way of life, and says something that older literature could never say?

I'm not shaming anyone, I used to mostly focus on modern literature, but for the past few years I've been digging into lit history and am overwhelmed by all that I want to read... I haven't even read Schiller yet! Nor all of Goethe! I have so much 19th Century Norwegian literature left, and that's a tiny country... I also speak Italian, French, German etc... I haven't read every Shakespeare play - by far...

I've only read a few Greek tragedies... and now Roman plays... Nor Cicero... or Augustine... Nor most Norse sagas, I'm only half-way into The Divine Comedy... And I need to finish the French science fiction novel written in 1788!

22 April 2025 · reply

I tell people I'm currently giving myself the high school education I never got. Not just ancient languages, but an actual overview of world history, literary movements, reading the literary greats, understanding how to approach poetry, classical music...

30 July 2025 · reply

in five years, you'll be five years older no matter what! Wouldn't it be cool to be five years older, and also read ancient Greek? Or be able to play the saxophone? Or know woodworking?

12 September 2025 · reply

Would love to find a system for other topics that can work on the same logic - because I'm not a student who can sit for hours every day anymore, but there's so much I want to learn (and retain).