The Absent Curriculum

Curricula are usually described through their contents. The Absent Curriculum starts with what disappears.

As generative systems become routine, some activities may cease to be explicitly taught because software performs them adequately; others may acquire new value precisely because machines perform them badly. The result may not be a simple loss of skills but a rearrangement of what institutions consider worth practising.

This note proposes the absent curriculum as a way of tracking those changes: the exercises removed, the judgements delegated, the forms of attention no longer required, and the occasional obsolete practice deliberately preserved.