Recess II

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 27

When I decided to write about academia for this volume of Learned, I didn’t anticipate being quite so salty. I knew, of course, that there were some issues with academia as a whole and as it directly applies to me, but I figured we’d just talk about some of the words that comprise academic standards and practices and move on with our lives.

Recess, niche, nook - no matter what you call it, it’s still featureless and bland. Kind of like modern education. Aw, yeah, shots fired, baby! Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Instead, I find myself thinking less about the words and more about how the systems that shape so much of modern life are fundamentally broken. Actually, let me take that back - they’re not broken so much as they’re antiquated. Academia is a good example wherein a lot of the practices that are in place today evolved over centuries only to be stood on their heads when seen in the light of modern understanding. Things that were normal are now seen as privileged and things that were thought to be the natural order of things are now understood to be the result of inequalities baked into top-down societies.

This is seen in words like orthodoxy and doctrine and pedagogy, all relics from a time when people were trying to bring light and knowledge into the world, but all twisted into standardized practices that may have lost their function in the modern world. Likewise job titles like dean and doctor. Their actual roles in academic institutions are a far cry from where the words came from.

Semantic shift is, of course, nothing new. Every word we have, the good ones, the bad ones, the ones somewhere in between have undergone some kind of shift over the centuries. But it’s worth examining these words to find the hidden bones that may help us to understand how today’s institutions were built. It’s a lot easier to dismantle them that way.

And that’s what surprises me, about myself, the most. I don’t think of myself as a deconstructionist. For as much as I delight in absurdity and, occasionally, in articulated chaos, I do like things to have structure and order. But if any one thing has become clear over the past 26 issues, it’s that I don’t think modern education is worth the paper it foists off on graduates. Funny what sort of thoughts come slithering out of the dark recesses of the mind, innit?

Also, the irony being that I’ve spent my entire professional life as a teacher of one stripe or another is neither unrelated nor irrelevant. Rather, it is the entire fucking point.

Obviously, recess and recession share a root. But you knew that. I mean, hell, you’ve felt that, haven’t you. Yeah, me too. Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

The next two dozen issues of Learned have been mapped out. They’ll continue in this vein of academic words that may have outlived their usefulness in so far as the institution, position, or idea they represent have become obsolete and in need of replacing. However, rather than get into the words that represent classroom learning, the positions of power, or the ways in which learning have become commodified, we’ll shift into discussing words that describe how we learn.

I hope this will lead us into thinking more about what has become my thesis for this volume - that we need to reclaim learning as an intentional, joyful act of will, one that allows us to become our fullest selves regardless of the expectations or limitations placed on us by our educational systems. I hope that by discussing the words that describe the linguistic and sociological processes we engage in when we learn we’ll be able to find ways to do some of that reclamation. God knows I could use some of it.

For now though, for this week, I need a break. Hence this recess. I hope you’re all doing well. I look forward to seeing you back here next week, with the first word in the latter half of Learned Volume 8, analysis.

Stay curious,

Joel

Accreditation Justification

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 26

For all that academia has been fundamentally broken, there is value left in the bloated and festering corpse.

Hi. Spooky season imagery, y’all. Come on in.

Honestly I just want to know how long it took to stage the shot. Photo by Steven Van Elk on Unsplash

To my mind, the most salvage worthy part of the corpus academia is in the system of oversight and quality control known as accreditation. If you went to a traditional university with a campus and faculty and actual classrooms, chances are good you went to an accredited university, i.e. one that has met specific pedagogical and educational criteria designed to ensure that any student who attends will receive an education equal to the cost of acquiring it.

And, look, the reason I’m honing on this is because accreditation is a very specific word. It literally means to point towards trust. When the word first entered English it was as a verb. You could accredit someone, meaning that you vouched for them. In other words, you could point Tarbelly towards Featherfoot and they would both understand that you were saying that you trust Featherfoot and therefore Tarbelly could also trust Featherfoot.

Now, the internet has brought an entirely new class of learning products to the consumer. Which is…good? You want to study something useful and skills based like Underwater Basket Weaving? There’s a course for that. Something ridiculous like Political Grandstanding for Fun and Profit? Got a course right here.

The point is, it’s easy these days to find online courses for every subject under the sun. But. Verifying that the course was created or sourced by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about is hard. Really, obnoxiously hard.

Take your average gymfluencer¹, for example. What proof do you have that they have any idea what the hell they’re talking about? A quick before and after photo splashed on the screen like Photoshop hasn’t been a thing for thirty years.

Ok, maybe influencers are not the same kind of product that universities offer and therefore exempt from the same kind of accreditation demands. But what about the incredible number of commodified lesson systems out there? An influencer buys your time with a promise to help you achieve something: lose weight, get rich, become a playboy. Become Batman. Whatever. Meanwhile a university is promising something else entirely. They’re promising to teach you the skills you need to get a job. To level up your life.

And the key thing here, is that whether the influencer met the obligation of their promise is up to you to decide. Meanwhile, whether a university does is conferred in the status of the degree you earn and what that then says about you. It is entirely external.

Not pictured: the accreditation process. Photo by Changbok Ko on Unsplash

Because of this, we’ve created an entire system of oversight, bylaws, and accountability known as accreditation. Social media and its influencers, gurus, and podcast bros…hasn’t. And as long as the promise to change your life for the better stays firmly in the realm of the parasocial, well, such is life. Increasingly though, the social sphere and the online education sphere are intersecting in weird and interesting ways. This is good. The lack of oversight and accountability is not.

I’ve done a bunch of online courses over the years. Call it a hobby, call it a folly, call it Tuesday night, it’s something I enjoy. A lot of the courses I take are not from properly accredited institutions but they kind of borrow that level of trust (credit, anyone?) by associating themselves heavily with universities. These are places like FutureLearn and The Knight Center for Journalism. Their courses are taught by university professors and are promoted as adjacent to standard curricula. They’re not really the problem.

But I’ve also taken a bunch of course from two different, very contrasting sources: Domestika and O’Reilly. The former is all art and soft skills. It’s an educational system in the same vein as Masterclass or Udemy. Anyone can make a class and the only real verification is that you can actually produce what you say you can. In other words, if I make a course promising to teach you how to do Underwater Basket Weaving for fun and profit, I’d better be able to walk you through the weaves.

O’Reilly, on the other hand, started out as a publisher. Back when, if you walked into any sort of tech office, you’d see a pile of books with different animals on the covers on every desk; if you needed some kind of coding knowledge, O’Reilly had a book for it. When the internet started to really go mainstream, O’Reilly decided to create on online school to teach people to learn to code.

The issue with both systems, Domestika and O’Reilly, is that being able to do something doesn’t mean you’ll be able to teach others how to do it. I’ve had some fantastic experiences on Domestika. Funny, articulate, knowledgeable people who have helped me level up my art skills. O’Reilly, on the other hand, well, I have a few certificates from them and I can’t code to save my life.

To me, this shows that in the shift from more formal learning to self-directed, independent, and online learning², the nature of accreditation and what it means to be a trusted source of pedagogy has to change as well. A lack of accreditation really means a lack of accountability.

And my argument here is that we need a similar sort of system for all the new online learning facilities sprouting up like mushrooms. I know, I know, the last thing any of us needs is more decisions made by committee and haven’t we already seen that accreditation is mostly a scam? Whomever pays the right fees gets accredited? Yeah. Possibly. Doesn’t change the fact that bureaucracy, is a tool and when applied in the right manner, it can protect the individual against the system. In this case, a system that demands oversight and protection against unrealistic expectations and inept pedagogy might go a long way towards turning online education from a half-assed method of maybe learning something, to a real and valuable method of engaging in true learning.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Alright, you know we stan a neologism ‘round these parts but holy hell that one hurt to write.

2. Or, possibly, an even more uncertain future where we ditch all the AI tools and insist on small classrooms with very qualified and well-supported teachers and educational systems but why would we bother? We might actually fix some of our problems and we don’t want that now do we?

Scholastification

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 25

The book fair was easily the best day of second grade. I had money. They had books. Shelves of them, all marked by that little red ribbon in the bottom corner. I loved that little red ribbon. It meant that I was going to be able to escape into a world where things made sense.

It’s been 43 years since second grade and I’m still going to book fairs. Sometimes I even buy books I can barely read because a bargain is a bargain!

But, of course, the book fair wasn’t just books. Posters, pencils, trapper keepers, stickers, lots of stuff. And, yeah, it was school-related stuff, mostly. You might have to squint a little to figure out how my Concorde poster related to school, but, sure, scholastic.

Since then, Scholastic has become scholastic in that it no longer makes me think of a brand name but rather a bunch of dusty academics crowded into mildewing libraries debating the pragmatics of whether scholarly and scholastic are proper synonyms. But capitalized or not, the dark secret is that modern scholarship too often comes down to money.

Common collocations - achievement, performance, success, integrity - sound great. But as study after study has shown, the amount of funding and resources a given school has noticeably impacts how students do. So, in other words, money drastically affects academia which means academia, like everything else, is becoming enshittified at an alarming rate.

Enshittification¹ is a great word. As far as I know, Cory Doctorow made it up several years ago to describe the way things fall apart in the modern world: a company makes a great product to attract customers -> customers add value to the company -> the value attracts investors -> investors become shareholders -> shareholders demand profit -> profit demands more ‘innovation’ at the cost of the product consumers knew and loved -> product becomes shitty -> customers abandon the product -> the company is sold for parts -> investors profit regardless -> consumers lose a valued and beloved product to the whims of modern capitalism. Enshitification.

That route highlights the hidden power of money behind everything. So let’s look at scholarship. We know where the money is in academia, right? It’s in the funding and grants that drive universities, it’s in the allocations and budgets that go to public schools. But it’s also in the tools we’re building to teach ourselves.

Let me give you an example. Millions of us have tried Duolingo for learning a language. Why? Because it’s fun. Because we like learning. Now, whether Duolingo’s method is the best way of learning is up for debate, but the point remains - we try it because we like learning. As I write this, in October of 2025, my TikTok feed is bombarded by ads for ’smart’ versions of TikTok that promise to replace doomscrolling with learning. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

A lot of these services are free. Only not really, right? Because if an app is free in this day and age it’s because the app is not the product, we are. In the enshittification flow-chart I put up above, an app like Duolingo is smack dab in the middle, in the process of adding features users don’t want in an attempt to bring in new users and therefore generate more revenue for their shareholders. Cycle, meet Vicious.

So what do we do about it?

Of course, sometimes, we have to learn things the hard way. Which is how I know this photo is just a bad idea in the making. Hell of a lot of fun learning that though.

In this current series in Learned, where I’ve been poking at the words that define academia with a cattle prod, hoping to stir the behemoth into enough life that it affects change within itself, I’ve talked about the value in developing one’s one teaching and learning styles (Issue 8.7 Possessive Pedagogy). I’ve talked about how everyone should take ownership of their curiosity and use to bring light and knowledge into the world (Issue 8.14 Doctor Thyself). And now I’m saying that doing so is one of the strongest tools we have in fighting against, well, you know.

And because we need a name for this taking back of knowledge and self-directed learning, I propose scholastification². Scholastification isn’t just autodidacticism³; it’s the willful, deliberate rejection of the monetization of learning in favor of staying curious in a system that wants curiosity to be profitable. And it’s a defiant reminder that learning is fun.

Scholastic means related to school. We know that. But back in the original Greek, scholastēs meant live as you please⁴. And part of doing that meant learning shit just because you want to and because you can. It wasn’t until the clergy brought the word into Latin and from there to French and English that it acquired its modern meaning. But forget the modern meaning. Let’s take scholastic back to its roots - learning something because it’s fun, just because you can.

Because that’s what we need now. The Internet has a thousand ways to learn things. From Masterclass to Wikihow to some random dudes TikTok where he shows you how to change the oil in your car, learning on the internet is easy. And yet we’re in danger of losing that because it doesn’t turn a profit. Because it doesn’t ‘contribute’ to the economy except for the very limited number of creators who can get the eyeballs to squeeze money from the service providers.

At the end of the day, though, we’re just humans. We are, as Terry Pratchett framed it, the falling angel meeting the rising ape. And we are so damned inquisitive and so damned curious about this reality we inhabit and it’s we have to protect that at all costs. We are merely human and we love learning⁵. Just because it’s fucking fun.

So here’s my proposal - every time you learn something just because you want to, just because it tickles your noggin’, call it a scholastic act. Not something you did because someone assigned it or because you got internet points for it. Every act of learning is scholastic curiosity. Scholastic joy. Scholastic fervor. Scholastification.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Cory’s new book is called Enshittification; presumably, he’s going to expand on the phenomenon I described above. I’m very much looking forward to reading it, but I exist at the whims of the Japanese inter-library loan department. Fortunately, their service is not owned by shareholders and is thus mostly immune to enshittification. But I still gotta wait.

2. For the word nerds among you, by which I mean all of you, yes, scholastification was already a word, but it meant to make something more academic. I am following the tried and true rules of English and making shit mean what I want it to mean, damn the torpedoes.

3. Also, for the really pedantic among you, yes, autodidacticism means to learn something just because you want to. I’m adding nuance and flavor by specifying that this learning stuff is a fun thing to do. Not only because we can, but because it’s fun!

4. Technically, this is not the earliest root - that would be the Greek word skholē which meant, uhm, leisure.

5. Admittedly, the modern educational system has failed some of you so badly it is hard to see it, but trust me you still love learning. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be reading this.

Suprahermeneuticexpialidocious

Learned Vol. 8, Issue 24

Over the summer, the word curriculum had a bit of a viral moment. Suddenly, there were people all over TikTok telling you about their personal curriculum. The idea, it seems, is to grab a visually pleasing stack of books and tell us all about how these particular books are connected in some way that allows you to better yourself. In fact, here’s an explainer. But, the point is, I’m here for it.

I’m not entirely sure this is how you DIY a curriculum, but I’ll give it a shot. Photo by Meg Jenson on Unsplash

It doesn’t feel like it ought to be a flex to say that I’m all for anything that moves us closer to learning and further from scrolling; that I support lifelong learning shouldn’t ought to be a controversial take. Yet, at this moment, in kind of feels like it is. So, let me see if I can string some thoughts together.

I like learning. That’s where the title of this newsletter comes from. And I’ve been building curricula, both professional and personal, for a couple of decades now. (See: Learned 3.48 DIY MA and also Learned 8.3 Curriculum Vital amongst many others.) But at some point, for me, the journey stopped being about learning things and became more about learning as a philosophy, as a way of being curious about the world.

Being that can be understood is language.

—Truth and Method (1975), Hans-Georg Gadamer

What that means in practical terms is I quit worry about new facts and trivia and instead starting trying to feel my way through the intangible lay lines that bind everything relationally to everything else. And, again, I don’t just mean a chain of connections or list of canon events, I mean looking at Schrödinger’s dead-alive cat and asking, “Why not start with a mouse? What did ol’ Schrödinger have against cats, anyway?”

Okay, maybe that’s a little glib. The point I’m trying, and failing, to get to is that there is more to learning than the base ingestion of new material. The better part of learning means asking what something means, how that meaning is transmitted, and what the creator thought they were doing in making it — not because intention defines meaning, but because it’s one of the many lenses through which we keep meaning alive. In other words, looking at the semantic, pragmatic, and hermeneutic¹ aspects of our DIY curricula.

Still with me?

The trouble with semantics is that it too often assumes a fixed meaning. “Hello” just means “hello.” Only, anyone who’s ever watched David Tenant play The Doctor can tell you that’s not the case. Sometimes, “hello” means, “Well, this is new and interesting and has totally captured my attention.” In other words, the trouble with semantics is that it is inherently limited by what we’ve all accepted as the collective truth.

Pragmatics is not any better. Pragmatics tries to go beyond the limits of mere meaning by encoding each unit of meaning with an entire field of possible expressions of that meaning. To oversimplify an example, pragmatics insists that waving at someone means hello or goodbye when it may only have meant hello or goodbye in that specific moment between those two parties. At other times, waving might mean any of a thousand other things and we assign meaning as befits our personal experience, background, knowledge, and reading of the momentary context. We usually get it right. But not always.

And so we search for something else, a heuristic that lets us interpret both those set meanings and the possible expressions thereof and we land squarely on the practice and theory of hermeneutics. Was the person in the previous examples shouting “hello” and waving at us merely greeting us? Or were they trying to get our attention so they could sell us something? Maybe they were just obscuring what was happening behind them? Or maybe they were simply obfuscating the arising of the great old ones by momentarily distracting us?

But this isn’t just a one-sided interpretation. Hermeneutics² - with a capital H - developed as a dialogue between speaker and listener, author and reader. Classically, this was a formal stance, one used by theologians studying the Bible or by lawyers practicing law. In fact the word hermeneutics comes directly from a similar sounding Greek word that means to interpret or to translate. And that’s something we humans do innately, possibly even instinctively.

What I mean is, there are no easy answers and nothing is set in stone. Instead, every act of communication requires active interpretation to derive meaning from it. And while it is a natural skill inherent to every human, it is one that nevertheless needs practice and forming. We have to learn how to understand what we think is happening if we want to have any hope of allowing others to understand us.

If there is a single illustrative tome to accompany this essay it would be Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. In the book, Einstein’s, and the readers’, perhaps, perceptions of time are explicitly experimented with and upon coming to the conclusion that within the perception of time, it is experience and memory that allows us to shape how meaning is made and understood.

I’m not sure what tradition is being celebrated here but I’m reasonably sure it’s not the one Gadamer had in mind. Photo by Dibakar Roy on Unsplash

It’s a gorgeous, sometimes haunting work that demands both attention and interpretation. But I’ve already read it. Like a dozen times³. So, in the interest of building a curriculum for myself with the express idea that the works in it should invite interpretation and deep consideration, I’ve identified a couple of gaps in my cultural empire: I’ve never read Borges and I’ve never watched any of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films⁴.

So that’s my contribution to this particular trend - an open-admission of some stuff I ain’t read or seen. Stuff that, reportedly, is difficult to assign definitive meaning to, stuff that plays with expectations and meaning and how do we even begin to interpret that? Play along, let me know what’s on your personal curriculum, or just tell me why I’m wrong. There is, after all, always meaning to be found in a conversation.

Stay curious,

Joel

1. Yes, I’m oversimplifying. A lot. Like a whole freaking lot. Go read a book for Hans-Georg’s sake.

2. Okay, my stair-stepping of semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics probably wouldn’t survive a decent literature review. But, thinking less academically and more holistically, they form a neat triangle for the act of learning. Or so I think anyway.

3. Ooooh. Much smart. So read.

4. Half of you are absolutely shocked about this. The other half of you are scratching your heads thinking, who? It’s okay. There’s room enough in this circus tent for all us little weirdos.