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Comment by tirutiru | Hacker News Reader

I heard about St. John's from a twitter thread and find it deeply baffling.

It's as if a group of monks wanted to keep the quadrivium and trivium but their clock stopped at the 16th century. One of their faculty proudly said they study analysis by reading Descartes! Which I thought was a highbrow joke but nope, dead serious.

There's a reason that 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is a thing. Dive into the classics after you have gained the maturity from modern texts.

Take one of the easier problems from Rudin. Prove that a continuous function from the unit interval [0,1] to itself has a fixed point. I wonder how a student immersed in the 'classics' would even begin to tackle this.

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It's not a Mathematics degree. It's not even a Philosophy of Mathematics degree. It's a particular type of Philosophy degree.

So, to be fair: most philosophy majors wouldn't have much luck with Rudin.

> Dive into the classics after you have gained the maturity from modern texts.

Diving into old texts is a skill unto itself. That's why a lot of institutions do the great books thing as a core curriculum (so, maybe 2-3 courses taught in this style, as an alternative to more conventional phil 101/history 101 style distribution requirements). Then a more conventional education from there onward. The theory is that this is a mid-point precisely because it provides lots of transferable skills for diving into the classics in your chosen field, while avoiding the "let's learn analysis from descarte" excesses.

When I was a pretentious high schooler with fantasies of being an intellectual, I considered going there. I ended up not even applying. It just seemed too far out of the norm.

I think their deal is taking seriously the "college is about learning how to learn" thing, and direct engagement with the output of people regarded as greats in their fields on the assumption that, when possible, that's a good idea for obvious reasons (whether that's true or not in some rigorously-provable way, I can't say, but the reasons one might suspect that it is seem clear enough)

Some report it's pretty damn effective at that and leads to an impressive breadth of intellectual confidence in tackling material of almost any sort, but IDK. Anecdotes.

IIRC (it's been a while since I looked into their programs) they do a lot of supplemental reading of newer papers, articles, and book excerpts, and tend to used updated notation when it makes sense. Plus all their classes are heavily discussion-oriented so the reading is potentially enhanced and brought "forward" by whatever their instructors and peers bring to class in their heads.

> Take one of the easier problems from Rudin. Prove that a continuous function from the unit interval [0,1] to itself has a fixed point. I wonder how a student immersed in the 'classics' would even begin to tackle this.

I don't think they tend to train mathematicians, and I think for most students (graduating from any college or university) they never, ever, ever touch the specifics of their more-advanced e.g. math classes (I think this is true even for most programmers or engineers or what have you) any time in the entire rest of their lives, to the point that entirely forgetting most of that stuff by a decade or so later and suffering for that not at all is utterly typical. How much does it matter for students who aren't going into extremely narrow vocations that they come out of them unable to perform this specific task, without first needing to study further?

The usual defense of this fact is "well it's about learning how to learn, expecting the actual content to ever matter for any but a teensy tiny proportion of the students is unreasonable" in which case... see the rest of the post.

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