Jason Crawford's article about "Navigating the high seas," provides compelling descriptions of new tools and techniques (such as sextants and chronometers) used by explorers from "seafaring nations in the 1700s and 1800s ... to complete the discovery of the world that had begun in the 1400s." 

In the early 1800's another profound lesson about causes of progress was learned. to the progress of seafaring that had a profound, if unseen, effect on the world: William Whewell (English scientist and theologian) led the first systematic application of scientific induction by organizing thousands of volunteers around the world to collect data enabling ocean tides to be predicted. It is considered one of the first "citizen science" projects in history, and earned him the Royal Metal in 1837. 

Whewell's work reduced the...

In the previous post, we outlined three phases that students would go through, where each student matriculated through them at their own speed.

Phase 1 was literacy and numeracy.

Phase 2 was core civilizational requirements and survey courses.

Phase 3 was core adulting requirements and self-study.

There are two specific curricula involved in these phases: core civilizational requirements and core adulting requirements.

In this post, we’ll go into more detail about the core civilizational requirements.

Core Civilizational Requirements

What does it mean to live in this day and age?

Where does the material abundance we take for granted come from?

What was life actually like for most of human history, and why is it so much better now?

These are questions that everyone ought to be able to answer, and the fact that most students - and...

The problem you run into when designing a curriculum is that you have to decide what you want students to learn.

The problem with deciding what you want students to learn is that your decisions will inevitably end up being a reflection of your values. It isn’t a task that can be done objectively.

Do you prioritize STEM topics, hoping to increase the high-tech work force?

Do you go for an education in the classics, because that’s how the aristocrats did it?

Do you focus on art and music, because something something creativity and expression?

Should school life be regimented and strictly scheduled, as public schools currently are, or ad hoc and personalized?

It’s difficult to claim that these questions even have “right” answers, whatever “right” means in this context.

Thus the curriculum that...

By Alex Telford for Asimov Press (https://press.asimov.com/articles/mouse-microscope)

It was 1905, and the French biologist Lucien Cuénot had a puzzle on his hands. He had been breeding mice in an attempt to decipher the patterns of coat color inheritance, but one of his crosses wasn’t behaving as expected. When Cuénot bred heterozygous yellow-coated mice—with yellow coloring as the dominant trait and black as the recessive—he observed two yellow mice born for every black one, instead of the predicted 3:1 ratio. It took another five years for a pair of American researchers to come up with an explanation before going on to pioneer the mouse as biomedicine’s premier model organism.

Cuénot’s puzzle seemed, at first, to be a violation of Mendel’s laws of inheritance. But such exceptions are typical of biology,...

The application deadline for the the 2024 cohort of The Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive is Friday, June 7—just over a week away. If you want to apply, do it now.

The Blog-Building Intensive is an eight-week program for aspiring progress writers to start or grow a blog. It also makes you a Roots of Progress fellow, which means that even after the intensive, you are part of our network and we are committed to supporting your career success as a progress writer. See more details on the program homepage.

Not just for beginning writers

Are you an experienced writer, and wondering if you’ll get anything out of the program? It is not only for beginning writers!

Last cohort, many of our fellows were experienced professionals: Several worked full-time for relevant...

In the very first episode of “Friends,” Rachel flees her wedding to find her high school friend. Monica invites Rachel to move into her spare bedroom and helps her get a job. Her brother Ross and their friends help her cut up her credit cards and learn to live independently. 

I was in fourth grade when that television show debuted and in college by the time it ended. By then, these characters were ingrained in one another’s lives, and mine. Rachel stumbled into a community of friends, like Phoebe who teaches her how to run more freely, Ross and Joey who became “nap partners,” and Monica who puts a turkey on her head to cheer up Chandler. 

This tight-knit group lived in the same apartment building or very close...

The problem you run into when designing a curriculum is that you have to decide what you want students to learn.

The problem with deciding what you want students to learn is that your decisions will inevitably end up being a reflection of your values. It isn’t a task that can be done objectively.

Do you prioritize STEM topics, hoping to increase the high-tech work force?

Do you go for an education in the classics, because that’s how the aristocrats did it?

Do you focus on art and music, because something something creativity and expression?

Should school life be regimented and strictly scheduled, as public schools currently are, or ad hoc and personalized?

It’s difficult to claim that these questions even have “right” answers, whatever “right” means in this context.

Thus the curriculum that...