Discover the Studying Listing for Harvard’s Humanities 10: The “Brutal” Humanities Class That is Abruptly in Excessive Demand

There are plen­ty of excellent rea­sons a stu­dent may need to go to Har­vard. One is its lengthy his­to­ry, at the very least by Amer­i­can stan­dards; anoth­er is the for­mi­da­ble accom­plish­ments of the professional­fes­sors employed to show there. However on some lev­el, a teenag­er look­ing to come back up on the earth — or, in lots of cas­es, par­ents look­ing to place their teenag­er up on the earth — below­stands full nicely that a lot of what an insti­tu­tion like Har­vard gives comes right down to its selec­tiv­i­ty. Con­sid­er­ing how few get in ver­sus what number of apply, it might be straightforward to imagine that almost all of a stu­den­t’s bat­tle is gained on the level of accep­tance. Imag­ine the despair, then, of a brand new­ly arrived Har­var­dian fac­ing anoth­er entrance examination and writ­ten appli­ca­tion simply to get a seat in Human­i­ties 10.

Its unin­tim­i­dat­ing title notwith­stand­ing, Human­i­ties 10 is the oppo­web site of a kind of intro­duc­to­ry cours­es by way of which an enormous, darkish­ened lec­ture corridor filled with contemporary­males can doze. “Stu­dents learn a hefty ebook every week and write reg­u­lar essays,” studies Pamela Paul in a current Wall Road Jour­nal arti­cle. “There isn’t any move/fail choice. Dig­i­tal units are ver­boten, and atten­dance is tak­en in each lec­ture.” This 12 months’s syl­labus, which the WSJ has additionally pub­lished (additionally discover it under), “begins with The Odyssey, trav­els for­ward in time to James Joyce’s Ulysses after which again­ward to finish with The Ili­advert. In between are assign­ments on Mon­taigne, Shake­speare, Spin­oza, Bald­win, Dante and Pla­to.” Amid these nice books of the West­ern world seem works by Woman Murasa­ki, Sor Jua­na, and Cao Xue­qin.

With cer­tain excep­tions — Bald­win’s essays, three set up­ments of Krzysztof Kies­lowski’s Deka­log — this cur­ricu­lum may very well be a cen­tu­ry previous. The truth is, Human­i­ties 10 dates again solely to 2008, when the Eng­lish professional­fes­sors (and acclaimed writ­ers) Stephen Inexperienced­blatt and Louis Menand put it togeth­er “as a Har­vard twist on a famed Colum­bia senior sem­i­nar and Yale’s Direct­ed Stud­ies professional­gram, and a strategy to com­bat plum­met­ing stu­dent inter­est within the human­i­ties.” However in a method, its roots run again to 1945, when the uni­ver­si­ty pub­lished the report “Gen­er­al Edu­ca­tion in a Free Soci­ety,” which made the case for professional­vid­ing all stu­dents with the identical non-pro­fes­sion­al, non-spe­cial­ized intel­lec­tu­al foun­da­tion. Across the identical time, it intro­duced Human­i­ties 2: The Epic and the Nov­el, a requirement­ing two-semes­ter course that nev­er­the­much less drew 850 stu­dents a 12 months at its peak.

Its suc­ces­sor Human­i­ties 10 accepts solely 90 contemporary­males, and the consequence­ing com­pe­ti­tion has drawn pub­lic atten­tion. So has the admit­ted stu­dents’ will­ing­ness to actu­al­ly do the learn­ing — and their appar­ent dis­dain for friends who would look over a couple of AI sum­maries and name it an edu­ca­tion. In the video above, Deep Work creator Cal New­port dis­cuss­es the reality this reveals, one which current tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments have occlud­ed. Rely­ing on quick­cuts to really feel­ings of reward — cul­ti­vat­ing social media as a substitute of a social life, watch­ing a trav­el video as a substitute of mak­ing a jour­ney, immediate­ing an LLM as a substitute of actu­al­ly writ­ing — strips our activ­i­ties of not simply their fric­tion, but additionally their con­textual content, and ulti­mate­ly their imply­ing. Like every value­whereas human expe­ri­ence, these books don’t cover their val­ue below lay­ers of dif­fi­cul­ty; their dif­fi­cul­ty is their val­ue.

FALL 2026

9/8 Homer The Odyssey
9/15 Aeschy­lus The Oresteia
9/22 Mon­taigne, Essays
9/29 Shake­speare, Ham­let
10/6 Spin­oza, The­o­log­i­cal-Polit­i­cal Trea­tise
10/13 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
10/20 Jane Austen, Emma
10/27 Mary Shel­ley, Franken­stein
11/3 Walt Whit­man, choose­ed poems
11/10 Friedrich Niet­zsche, On the Geneal­o­gy of Ethical­i­ty
11/17 T.S. Eliot The Waste Land
12/1 James Bald­win, The Fireplace Subsequent Time and Notes of a Native Son

SPRING 2027
1/26 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/2 James Joyce, Ulysses
2/9 Vir­ginia Woolf, essays and sto­ries
2/16 Edith Whar­ton, The Home of Mirth
2/23 Friedrich Schiller, Let­ters on the Aes­thet­ic Edu­ca­tion of Man
3/2 Ueda Aki­nari, Tales of Moon­gentle and Rain
3/9 Gio­van­ni Boc­cac­cio, The Decameron
3/23 Eihei Dōgen, Trea­sury of the True Dhar­ma Eye
3/30 Dante Alighieri, Infer­no
4/6 Longus, Daph­nis and Chloe
4/13 Pla­to, The Sym­po­sium
4/20 Homer The Ili­advert
4/27 Homer The Ili­advert

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Har­vard Clas­sics as Free eBooks: A “Moveable Uni­ver­si­ty” Cre­at­ed in 1909

The Open Syl­labus Mission Visu­al­izes the 1,000,000+ Books Most Fre­quent­ly Assigned in Col­lege Cours­es

Learn 5 Books Per Month & Develop into a Seri­ous Learn­er: Ideas from Deep Work Writer Cal New­port

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free On-line Cours­es: Discover Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & Extra

W. H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Requested Stu­dents to Learn 32 Nice Lit­er­ary Works, Whole­ing 6,000 Pages

Why Amer­i­cans Stopped Learn­ing Books

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the creator of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.