The Absent Curriculum

Curricula are normally described by listing what is taught. This paper proposes the opposite method: begin with activities that have disappeared.

As generative systems become ordinary educational infrastructure, drafting, remembering, searching, summarising and even discussion may cease to appear as explicit learning activities. Other practices acquire value because they are technologically unnecessary: handwriting, unaided recall, slow reading and the human tutorial.

The paper introduces the “absent curriculum” as an archaeological method for studying educational change. Its central claim is that automation is visible not only in new tools but in the exercises institutions quietly stop asking students to perform.