Know Thyself

This course is an apprenticeship in honest self-observation — the old Delphic instruction made into a working skill. The student learns to see the currents that run through his own mind unchosen: motivated reasoning, the ego-protective reflex, fear's tunnel, emotional reasoning, in-group pull, self-serving memory, and mis-calibrated confidence. Each is taught as standard-issue equipment on every human mind — armor and calibration, never self-distrust — with the classical lineage (Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Montaigne, Franklin) quoted from public-domain sources and the modern mechanisms framed as what researchers have found. The course trains the noticing and installs no conclusions; graders assess the honesty and specificity of the self-observation, never whether the student reached a favored view. It sits deliberately before the persuasion pipeline: the first person your rhetoric will ever work on is you.

Each lesson pairs a focused read — the current shown bending a real decision, a worked example, a self-observation drill — with a 20-minute applied close in which the student runs the faculty on a recent moment of his own, generative rather than confessional. Auto-graded weekly checks and semester tests anchor the assessment, and the closing unit runs the whole toolkit on one real moment, ending steady, not small.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.