Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.
All human beings by nature desire to know. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1
The whole of knowledge is your inheritance. Claim it.
A school without walls for people who refuse to be narrow. Everything worth knowing, in an order worth following, learnt among companions, with a tutor at every elbow.
A philosopher, a thirteen-year-old prince, and his friends, in a grove of springs and caves.
Philip of Macedon sent for Aristotle and gave him the sanctuary of the Nymphs at Mieza as a schoolroom. For around three years the prince Alexander and a cohort of young nobles studied ethics and politics, Homer and medicine: how to live and how to govern. Centuries later Plutarch reported that visitors were still shown Aristotle’s stone seats and shady walks.
The friends who grew up beside Alexander became his Hetairoi, the Companions. What they received was not a syllabus. It was a way of seeing the world as one connected thing, and a habit of asking why.
We think every serious student deserves the same. For the first time in history it is possible: a tutor with patience for any question, available to anyone. What the machine cannot supply is the rest of it. You still need the discipline, the companions, the workshop and the nerve. That is what this school is for.
What we believe
Wonder comes first.
“It is owing to their wonder that men both now and at first began to philosophise” (Aristotle, Metaphysics I.2). Curiosity is the engine, and the curriculum exists to feed it.
Everything is connected.
Geometry lives in architecture, statistics in medicine, Homer in military history. Learn the whole map, not one corner of it.
Hands and head together.
The workshop is a classroom. You don’t understand a thing until you can make it, break it and mend it.
Argue with your teachers.
Aristotle disagreed with Plato, his teacher for twenty years, and said we must honour truth above our friends (Nicomachean Ethics I.6). Here, everyone may be questioned.
Learn among companions.
Learn in a cohort, not a crowd. Peers who walk, argue, compete and build beside you teach as much as any master.
The machine is a tutor, not a substitute.
AI can give every student an Aristotle. It must never do the thinking, the writing or the making for them.
Leisure is the point.
The Greek word for leisure, scholē, gave us “school”. Learning prepares you for life. It is also one of the best parts of it.
Our lineage
The Greeks are our starting point, not our limit. Each of these rooms added something to the idea of how people learn.
- 343 BC · MiezaThe Nymphaeum
One teacher, one cohort, the whole of knowledge.
- 335 BC · AthensThe Lyceum
Research as a shared enterprise: a library, 158 constitutions, hundreds of animals.
- c. 280 BC · AlexandriaThe Mouseion
Scholars paid to study and teach, beside the great Library.
- c. 680 · JarrowBede’s monastery
Books carried from Rome, and a monk who delighted in learning, teaching and writing.
- c. 830 · BaghdadThe House of Wisdom
Translators carry Aristotle and Greek science into Arabic, then take them further.
- c. 1200 · Paris, OxfordThe university
Guilds of masters and students: the lecture, the disputation and Aristotle as set text.
- c. 1470 · FlorenceVerrocchio’s bottega
Leonardo learns by grinding pigment, casting bronze and drawing every day.
- 1603 · RomeThe Lincei
An academy named for the sharp-eyed lynx. Galileo joins in 1611.
- 1660 · LondonThe Royal Society
Experiments shown before witnesses. Take nobody’s word for it.
- c. 1765 · BirminghamThe Lunar Society
Makers and philosophers meet at the full moon and change the world.
- 1921 · CopenhagenBohr’s institute
Young physicists from everywhere argue quantum mechanics into shape.
- 1970 · Palo AltoXerox PARC
Researchers build the computer of the future, then use it every day.
- 2008 · HawthorneSpaceX
Falcon 1 reaches orbit on its fourth attempt. Fail, learn, fly again.
- Now · AnywhereYou
Every student with a tutor at their side and the whole map in view.
The Story
How the Companions learnt at Mieza, and what the Lyceum, the Mouseion, the monastery, the university, the bottega and later rooms added to it.
Read the story → ΚόσμοςWorld View
Seventeen domains in four branches drawn from Aristotle: instruments, knowing, acting and making. Open any domain to see its parts and how they connect to the rest.
Enter the map → ΠαιδείαCurriculum
A seven-stage order running from wonder to wisdom, with the methods, the spiral of return, how the time is spent, the rules for the machine and a library.
Read the order →World View
Aristotle divided knowledge into the sciences we pursue for their own sake, the practical sciences of acting well, and the productive arts of making. His followers set logic apart as the instrument (organon) of all three. Here are seventeen domains arranged in those four branches. Select one to see its parts, then select a part to see where it connects elsewhere.
Every domain and its parts
The Story
How the Companions learnt at Mieza, and what the later rooms of learning added. The Curriculum is built on what these rooms worked out.
Deliberately structured and open-ended.
The sources are thin. Plutarch wrote four centuries later, and much of what we “know” is reconstruction. But the outline is clear, and it shows a school in between: a hard, structured frame around open, curious inquiry.
The frame was Macedonian. Philip had formalised the royal pages: noble boys raised at court who guarded the king, rode, hunted and served at table. The boys at Mieza were of that age and class, so their frame was probably the same: discipline, the body, duty and rank. Their days were not their own.
The inquiry was Aristotle’s. His method, on the evidence of his own works, was dialectic: start from what people already believe (endoxa), set out the puzzles (aporiai) and reason towards what survives. Plutarch says Alexander received his ethical and political teaching, and also the deeper “acroamatic” teachings kept for pupils. Aristotle passed on a love of medicine: Alexander later prescribed treatments for his friends. Alexander also carried a text of the Iliad corrected by Aristotle. He kept it under his pillow beside a dagger, and later stored it in a precious casket taken from Darius.
The Greek ideal set the balance. In Politics VIII Aristotle names the four customary subjects: letters, gymnastics, music and sometimes drawing. He argues that education should aim at noble leisure, not only usefulness. He warns against making the young “banausic”, trained for a trade and nothing else. In Book VII he advises no lessons before five, only play, movement and stories.
The balance we take from this: a fixed rhythm and set texts, with freedom of question inside them. Open curiosity fails without structure, and structure deadens without curiosity.
- Where
- Sanctuary of the Nymphs, Mieza, near modern Naousa, Macedonia
- When
- c. 343–340 BC
- Teacher
- Aristotle, about 41; a pupil of Plato for twenty years
- Pupils
- Alexander, 13, with sons of the nobility. Tradition places Hephaestion there, and perhaps others who became generals and kings
- Studied
- Ethics, politics, Homer and medicine, in Plutarch; probably also rhetoric, dialectic, natural philosophy and geography
- Also
- Riding, hunting, arms, service at court
- Source
- Plutarch, Life of Alexander 7–8; Aristotle, Politics VII–VIII
“He admired Aristotle at first, and loved him, as he used to say, no less than his father: the one had given him life, the other the good life.”Plutarch on Alexander, Life of Alexander 8.4
Where each tradition sits
Placed between rigid structure and open curiosity. This is our reading, not a measurement.
What we take from each room
Greece gives us the aims. Later rooms kept learning alive, gave it institutions and methods, and turned it into making and change.
The Lyceum
Aristotle’s own school. By tradition, rigorous lectures in the morning for pupils and open ones in the evening for the public, with discussion in the covered walk (peripatos).
- Research as collective work: collect everything, then theorise
- Two registers: rigorous and public
- A library, a shrine to the Muses and maps of the known world
The Mouseion
Founded under the first Ptolemies, probably on the Lyceum’s model. Scholars were paid to study, and ate at a common table. Eratosthenes ran the Library; Herophilus pioneered anatomy; Euclid taught in the city.
- Give scholars time: it is the scarcest resource
- Collect every text, then correct it
- Measure the world: Eratosthenes and the size of the Earth
Bede’s monastery
Benedict Biscop brought books from Rome to twin monasteries in Northumbria. Bede entered at seven, stayed for life, and wrote that he had always delighted “in learning, teaching or writing”.
- The library as lifeline: copy, keep, teach
- A rule for the day: work, prayer and reading at fixed hours
- Scholarship that serves: Bede’s reckoning of time
The House of Wisdom
Under the Abbasid caliphs, translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq turned Greek medicine, mathematics and Aristotle into Arabic, and scholars such as al-Khwarizmi built on them. How formal an institution it was is still debated.
- To translate a work, you must understand it
- Inherit, then extend: al-Khwarizmi’s algebra
- Many languages, one library
The university
Masters and students formed guilds (universitates) with their own rules and degrees. Teaching meant the lecture on a set text and the formal disputation. From 1255 the Paris arts course set nearly all of Aristotle.
- Scholars set their own standards
- Disputation: defend a thesis against all comers
- The degree as a licence to teach
The bottega
In Verrocchio’s workshop Leonardo started with menial jobs, then did drawing, casting and painting, and finished parts of the master’s pictures.
- Apprenticeship: graduated responsibility on real commissions
- Drawing daily as a way of thinking
- The notebook: questions, sketches, lists
The Lincei
Federico Cesi, aged eighteen, founded the academy with three friends and named it for the sharp-eyed lynx. Galileo joined in 1611, and the Lincei published his Letters on Sunspots and The Assayer.
- See for yourself: the lynx’s eye
- Friends bound by a common purpose
- A shared name: members signed their work “Linceo”
The Royal Society
Founded after a lecture at Gresham College. Robert Hooke, its Curator of Experiments, showed new trials at meetings. Its motto, Nullius in verba, means take nobody’s word for it. Newton was its President from 1703.
- Evidence over authority
- Show the experiment before witnesses
- Publish it: Philosophical Transactions, from 1665
The Lunar Society
Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Priestley and Erasmus Darwin met monthly near the full moon, so they had light to ride home: on Sundays at first, then on Mondays after Priestley, a minister, arrived in 1780.
- Makers and theorists at the same table
- Demonstration over declamation
- Friendship as infrastructure for invention
Bohr’s institute
Niels Bohr’s institute drew young physicists from across Europe, Heisenberg, Pauli and Dirac among them. They argued in seminars, on walks and over table tennis, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics took shape.
- Gather the best young minds and let them argue
- Informality: seminars, walks, games
- A master who thinks aloud with his students
Xerox PARC
A research centre that built the Alto (1973), with its windowed screen and mouse, networked it by Ethernet and used it every day. Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group designed computers for children to learn with. After Steve Jobs visited in 1979, its ideas reached the Macintosh.
- Build the tools you will use, then use them daily
- Children as the test of a good tool
- Hire well, then give people room to work
SpaceX
Reasoning from first principles, hardware-rich testing and a willingness to explode a prototype to learn faster.
- Question the requirement before the design
- Build, test, fail, fix, all in weeks
- One named engineer owns each part end to end
The machine
In 1984 Benjamin Bloom found that one-to-one tutored students outperformed classroom peers by about two standard deviations. Later studies find smaller gains, but tutoring remains among the most effective teaching known. At that scale it used to be unaffordable. It no longer is.
- A Socratic tutor for every student
- A sparring partner that argues the other side
- Never a ghost-writer (see the rules below)
That is the inheritance. Now the order of study.
Curriculum
An order of study for a modern student with an AI tutor: how it is taught, how far a student may argue back, seven stages from wonder to wisdom, how the time is spent, the rules for the machine and what to read. For how the Companions learnt and what later rooms added, read The Story. For whoever teaches, there is the mentor’s guide.
How it is taught
One hard idea from someone who has mastered it. Short and dense, with questions allowed. Aristotle’s surviving works are largely lecture notes of this kind.
Pairs walk and argue the morning’s idea. Walking loosens thinking, and the name of Aristotle’s school may come from its covered walk.
A tutor, human or machine, draws out a belief and then tests it until it breaks or holds.
Collect what the wise and the many already say, list the puzzles honestly, then work towards a resolution. This works for any subject.
Real work for real users, with responsibility that grows. The bottega model applied to code, machines, buildings and ventures.
A hand-kept notebook of quotations, sketches, questions and failures, like Leonardo’s notebooks and Marcus Aurelius’ notes to himself. Memory is built, not searched.
Dinner, one question and a rule that everyone speaks. Cross-disciplinary by design, as at the Lunar Society.
At the end of every term, show what you made to people who owe you nothing. Keynote, launch or exhibition: the work must speak.
Seneca: homines dum docent discunt, people learn while they teach (Letters 7.8). Older students teach younger ones at every stage.
Hypothesise, build, test, fail, fix. It applies to an essay draft, an experiment or a rocket engine alike.
Everyone may be questioned, including the teacher.
“While both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends.”Aristotle, on disagreeing with Plato, Nicomachean Ethics I.6
- Nothing is exempt.Not the teacher, the textbook, the canon or this curriculum. A school that can’t be criticised has stopped learning.
- Earn the right first.Before you attack a view, state it so well its author would say, “I wish I’d put it that way.”
- Attack the argument, never the person.Companions disagree fiercely and stay companions.
- Bring a better proposal or a test.Criticism that only tears down is cheap. Offer an alternative or an experiment that would settle it.
- Argue in the symposium, commit in the workshop.Debate freely before a decision. Once the build starts, build, and bring the evidence back to the next symposium.
Where we begin: philosophy, history and science.
Aristotle answers it himself. In the Physics he says we must proceed from what is more knowable to us to what is more knowable by nature. In the Posterior Analytics he explains that what is nearer the senses is more knowable to us. That means starting with particulars and the senses and working towards principles. So we begin with the concrete world: stories, specimens, drawing, music, making things with our hands.
History is the first story, told as a narrative running from the Big Bang to breakfast. We return to it in Stage Ε as a question of causes: why states rise, why wars start, why ideas take hold.
Science follows the instruments. Once a student has language, number, logic and code, nature can be measured and not only admired.
Philosophy comes twice. Its tools (logic and dialectic) arrive early. Philosophy as a subject (questions about being, knowledge and mind) waits until a student has enough of the world to reason about.
Ethics and politics come last, on purpose. Aristotle says the young are not proper students of political science because they lack experience of life. Elsewhere he notes that the young can become good mathematicians but not practically wise, because practical wisdom (phronēsis) needs experience of particulars. That is why Stage Ϛ is built around real responsibility.
Every domain appears at every stage at a different depth, as a spiral and not a ladder. The stages use Greek numerals, including ϛ for six. Ages are a guide for a young student; an adult can move through the early stages in months.
To begin on Monday, follow the starter path: twelve weeks of Stage Α for a child, or a month for an adult.
Every domain, every stage, at a different depth
Read down a column to see a stage’s emphasis. Read across a row to see how a subject returns deeper each time.
CentralSubstantialTouchedBlank: absent
How the hours are spent
The balance shifts as a student grows. Play-heavy at first, then instruments, then workshop, then responsibility. Study never falls below a fifth of the week, and workshop time never below 15 per cent.
Select a category to follow it through the stages.
A day
A week, a month, a term
Rules for the tutor
An AI tutor is a powerful teaching instrument and an easy one to misuse. These rules keep it an Aristotle rather than a ghost-writer.
The tutor prompts put these rules into words any AI model will follow. Every stage and every part of the World View has its own; this is the base they share.
- Attempt first.The student tries before the machine speaks. A first attempt that fails still does most of the learning.
- The tutor asks more than it tells.Its default mode is Socratic. It gives answers only after the student has reasoned.
- Never outsource the making.It may critique the essay, the proof or the code. It may not write them.
- Verify everything.Machines can be confidently wrong. Trace every claim to a primary source, a measurement or a proof.
- Use it as an opponent.Ask it to argue the other side at full strength, then answer it.
- Explain it back.If you can’t teach it to the machine, and then to a younger companion, you don’t know it.
- Keep the notebook by hand.The machine remembers for you. The notebook makes you remember.
A reading list for every domain
Each list has three tiers. Begin is an accessible way in. Classic is the primary texts and the modern classics of each field, in the original or a good translation. Deeper is modern work for when you want the full picture. Read the primary texts; let the tutor help you through them, not around them.
Begin with wonder. End with something made.
Start here
Stage Α made concrete: what to do on Monday, and in the weeks after. A twelve-week plan for a child, in two tracks, and a month for an adult with time to give. The timings, books and targets are our suggestion, not history; change them to fit your household. Whoever teaches should also read the mentor’s guide.
The mentor’s guide
Aristotle had one pupil of note at Mieza and a few companions beside him. You may have one child, a family or a small cohort. This page is what the mentor needs to run the days, the weeks and the conversations, and what to watch for as a learner grows. It is our reading of the method, not a record of Aristotle’s lessons.
Ask, set the rhythm, keep the rules
You are not the source of answers. The library and the machine hold more than any mentor. Your work is to choose what comes next, ask the question that opens it and judge whether it has been learnt.
Guard the rhythm. Hard things early, the body every day, a rest day every week. A good week is mostly the same as the last one, with one new thing in it.
Model what you ask for. Keep your own notebook. Read in front of them. Say “I don’t know, let’s find out” often, and then find out.
Be questioned. The rules in Curriculum II apply to you. When a learner catches you out, thank them in front of the others.
Running the day and the week
The timings are in Start here for Stage Α and in Curriculum V for later stages. These are the habits that make them work.
Plan the week on Sunday evening, on one sheet: the week’s focus, the reading, the making, the field trip, the symposium question. Pin it where everyone can see it.
Start each day the same way. Out of doors first, then the hardest work while minds are fresh. No screens in the morning except the tutor, and only with the rules.
End each day with the notebook. Five minutes for a young child, twenty for an older one. Read it weekly, never mark it, and ask about one entry.
Keep the rest day. Nothing set, nothing checked. Scholē means leisure, and the habit of real leisure is part of the curriculum.
Once a month, show. The lunar evening is the deadline that makes things get finished. Once a term, show something to people outside the household.
Running the symposium
One question, one meal, everyone speaks. It trains the habits of Curriculum II: state a view fairly before you attack it, and attack arguments, not people.
- Choose the question in advance.Open, concrete and arguable: “Should Achilles have gone back to fight?”, not “What is courage?”. Announce it a day ahead so people come with a view.
- Everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice.Go round the table, youngest first. The mentor speaks last, if at all.
- Restate before you rebut.Before disagreeing, say the other view back until its owner agrees you have it right.
- Ask for reasons and cases.“Why do you think so?” and “Can you give an example?” do most of the work. Avoid giving your own answer.
- End with what is still open.Close by naming the best unanswered question. It goes in everyone’s notebook and may be next week’s question.
The field day
Aristotle collected; so do we. The point is to meet the real thing: the shore, the workshop, the court, the building site.
- Go somewhere real work or real nature happens.A rock pool beats an aquarium; a working joiner’s shop beats a craft centre. Ask ahead: most people are glad to show their work.
- Bring three questions and a notebook.Agree the questions beforehand. Draw at least one thing; drawing makes you look.
- Ask one expert one good question.The learner asks, not the mentor. Write down the answer in their words.
- Bring something back.A specimen for the cabinet, a photograph, a measurement, a sketch. Then write it up the next day, while it is fresh.
Using the AI tutor well
The rules are in Curriculum VI. Every stage and every part of the World View has a tutor prompt that encodes them. The mentor’s job is to see they are kept.
Start every session from a prompt. Copy the stage or sub-area prompt rather than typing a bare question. It tells the tutor to ask before it tells and never to do the work.
Sit with young children. Under ten, an adult holds the device and reads the replies aloud. Sessions are short: one question explored, then back to the world.
Check the notebook, not the chat. What the learner wrote by hand is what they learnt. If the notebook is thin and the chat is long, something is wrong.
Test for outsourcing by asking for an explanation. Polished work the learner cannot explain back, line by line, was not theirs. Ask kindly, and start again from the attempt.
Spot-check a claim a week. Pick one thing the tutor said and trace it to a source together. Sometimes it will be wrong; that lesson is worth the time.
Keep personal details out. No full names, addresses or school names in prompts. Our prompts never ask for them.
The mentor hour
One to one, as Aristotle with Alexander. It covers character, friendships, plans, doubts and health. Personal matters count as curriculum.
Walk if you can. Side by side is easier than face to face. Twenty minutes for a young child, an hour for an adult.
Use the same four questions. What went well? What puzzled you? What was hard? What next? Then follow wherever the answers lead.
Listen more than you talk. Silence is allowed. Give advice only when asked, or when something matters too much to wait.
Keep a short private note after each hour: one line on how they are, one on what you agreed. Read back over a term to see the pattern.
Keep confidences, except where someone’s safety is at risk. Say so at the start, so it is never a surprise.
What to watch for at each stage
What a mentor should look for, the sign that it is working and the common ways it goes wrong. Our reading, drawn from each stage’s aim and proof of work.
Commonplace book
The daily notebook stays by hand: memory is built, not searched. This book is for what you meet on a screen, the quotation, the tutor’s best question, the link worth keeping, filed against the map so you can find it again. Copy the best of it into the book on your desk.
Notes stay on this device. There is no account and nothing is sent anywhere, so export often: a browser can clear a site’s data, and the export is your copy.
Glossary
The Greek words this site uses, what they mean and where to check them. Each citation gives the work and the passage, so you can read the source yourself.