MCC's Core Curriculum
Reaching Beyond Mere Life
An Introduction to Montana Classical College’s Curriculum
Montana Classical College is an institution in a time of trouble. Two of the college’s core goals are for its students to understand nature and to perform noble deeds. So how should the curriculum be designed to help students achieve these goals?
Students will take 3 courses each semester. One course will come from our required core; one will be an elective of the student’s choosing; and one will be an independent study that the student creates in consultation with one of our instructors.
Allow me to lay out the core course sequence that students will take over their 4 years (with a note below on what it would look like to profitably be at MCC for one year). After introducing the core, a justification for having a core at all will be presented.
Year One
First Semester: Nationalism vs. Globalism
A student’s introduction to Montana Classical College will be through this course. It raises one of our core questions: should the world be many or one? It also helps contextualize the rest of their education. MCC, at bottom, is an activist institution that is in part devoted to fighting against the world becoming one. A world state is one that would squelch the study of nature and the pursuit of noble deeds.
Students should leave this class with a sense that there really is something at stake in how they conduct their lives and that monumental tasks await those with the courage to participate in the reconquista of the western world and mind. The books may vary some from the present syllabus, but the essence of the class will remain the same. It is also a course to test out books that are unlikely to be found on regular political philosophy reading lists.
Second Semester: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad
Homer’s Iliad presents readers with a radically different moral conception than our own. If a student is able to grasp and appreciate Homer’s aristocratic vision, or if they can come to understand Homer as he understood himself, they will have made serious gains in their quest to liberate their mind from the prevailing views imposed on them by their regime.
These two courses, taken together, constitute the fundamental orientation of Montana Classical College toward the world. We seek to recover an ancient disposition without pretending that we can retvrn to a golden age. Rather, we must face our dark circumstances squarely and nobly.
For students who choose to attend for only one year, they will take these two courses and so experience the two courses that constitute the essence of what it means to be an MCC student. As the MCC network expands, you know that you will be reaching out to people who understand the stakes of nationalism vs. globalism as well men who have tried to reach one of the summits and origins of Western thought in Homer.
Year Two
First Semester: The Stakes of the Enlightenment
The Enlightenment thinkers to be covered will vary depending on instructor preference. As with every course we have, we will attempt to understand the thinkers as they understand themselves. Other questions that we will carry into the course will revolve around trying to understand if the roots of the Enlightenment inevitably lead to the degradation of our world or if that degradation is the result of disastrous departures from true Enlightenment thinking.
The political philosophers of the Enlightenment were also responding to very different conditions than our own; so how much did those conditions dictate their political project? And, if the conditions dictated their project, does it follow that the innermost core of their teaching is not as different from the classical philosophers as we might initially suspect? The answers to all of these questions dictate how much guidance we ought to take, in the present moment and future, from the Enlightenment thinkers.
Second Semester: Thucydides’ War between the Peloponnesians and Athenians
In Thucydides’ history, we are invited at the outset of the book to try and look at our time from the perspective of eternity—or at least the closest approximation of it that we can manage. Thucydides imagines what Athens and Sparta would look like to future inquirers who find the cities emptied of all citizens. Which is to say, Thucydides carries with him an awareness that human things do not last. His ability to hold onto this fundamental insight grants him a special kind of objectivity or ability to see things as they are that we have to try and make our own as much as we can.
He will also offer a blame of Homer at the beginning of the book, but an attentive reading might reveal that they ultimately agree more than Thucydides’ initially lets on. Furthermore, he will help us to better understand the political context in which Plato’s Socrates finds himself when we turn to the Republic in the third year.
Year Three
First Semester: The True History of the American Founding and it’s Aftermath
As ever, we will try to understand the American founders as they understood themselves; content will vary with instructor expertise. We will try to understand the Founders connection to the Enlightenment and whether they corrected any vital flaws or whether they exacerbated deleterious tendencies. Did they depend on a pre-liberal moral dispensation that they slowly drew the capital out of, or did their epigones make disastrous departures from the Founder’s wisdom? Given the precarious state of things today, a question on our minds will be: why did things fall apart?
Whatever the answers to these questions may turn out to be, we will still draw inspiration from the Founders, for they were men of tremendous virtue who won and so deserved their freedom. They were men who could “lift a stone that no two men today could, because of our weakness,” as Homer might put it.
Second Semester: Plato’s Republic
Plato will be an indispensable guide to our understanding of the human soul and its deepest longings. He will help us assess the limits to what is possible in political life or help us establish sober expectations. For it is the case that precisely in a moment like ours, when life feels stifled, that our hopes might become enflamed as we seek some kind of superlative satisfaction out of political life after facing so much disappointment. Plato will help us properly diagnose our current political malaise.
Indeed, Socrates’ interlocutors are living through the end of Athens as they know it. We see Glaucon long for something impossible out of justice: for it to be good in itself without any reward and even or especially good if it entails nearly unimaginable suffering. So too he wishes for political life to put under a kind of rational supervision that will dispose of conflicting goods and bring the various types of humans into a perfectly harmonious whole.
Our students will be inoculated against utopian hopes; but they will not become socratized liberals—who among other things, are people so love in with possessing no hope, that they become too soft to act, excusing themselves from all uncomfortable actions by claiming to be “prudent”.
Year Four
First Semester: Founders Ancient and Modern
This class content here will vary more than in other courses and it will be more variegated as well. Part of it will be devoted to the classic accounts of founders such as Lycurgus or Romulus; but later portions of the class will be devoted to learning from more recent founders of successful businesses, schools, and countries. We will discuss how to build new institutions that are informed by great tasks; how to seize and wield power; and how to conquer the world.
Second Semester: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil
With Nietzsche we will turn to a man who argues that the time for esotericism is over and that dynamite is required. He explores the ancient thinkers that we’ve covered, he explodes the dichotomy between nationalism and globalism, and he liberates our political imagination from the trite formulations of our own time. He thinks through every topic that makes us uncomfortable today with unparalleled insight.
Students’ final semester at MCC, then, will be filled with vitalistic insights that will prepare them for the great tasks ahead of them.
Concluding Thoughts
At first, I imagined that nearly all of the courses at MCC would be required, with very few electives. Then I thought, at bottom, the teacher is almost infinitely more important than the curriculum; a bad teacher won’t bring Plato or Nietzsche to life; a good teacher can bring almost anything to life. So, if MCC can find good enough teachers, they shouldn’t be restricted in teaching what they wish to. And students should take whatever interests them because they will pour their heart into the school if they are animated by the courses they care to take.
But, on the other hand, there is something special about having core classes. By having a common set of questions that a cohort of students can think through together outside of class as they move through the school, they begin to form a foundation for friendship. The classroom is important, but it is only the tip of the iceberg; the thinking you do by yourself and the conversations you have with your friends are potentially more important. To understand yourself, nature, and nobility, and to act on the basis of that understanding, constitutes a way of life; our institution prepares you for that way of life. Core classes bring the school together.
I’ve now settled on a middle route. Not because compromise is always good but that we might be able to harness the virtues of both approaches. The middle route is what I described above, as 3 courses per semester: 1 core; 1 elective; 1 independent study. Core classes create a unified conversation. Electives allow our teachers to teach what they know best or are most interested in while creating choices for students. Independent studies prepare students to be sovereign individuals who are prepared to ask, answer, and solve questions on their own.
An obvious feature of our core courses is that they are generally oriented toward political philosophy. Some electives will naturally cover similar topics, but there will also be science, tech, and practical courses available as electives. One of my core goals right now to is to recruit a science instructor (humanmolecule26, if you are out there please contact me!) And we’ve already discussed what the independent projects might look like.
As Diomedes says in Book 10 of the Iliad shortly before a night raid that is initiated while things bleak for the Achaeans:
“If another comrade would escort me, though, there’d be more comfort in it, confidence too. When work side by side, one or the other spots the opening first if a kill’s at hand. When one looks out for himself, alert but alone, his reach is shorter—his sly moves miss the mark.”
So join MCC and let us help extend your reach! At Montana Classical College you will be part of the right wing counter-elite that will win undying glory and everlasting fame!