Random School Subject Generator

What the random school subject generator does

Tap the button and it hands you a subject, from Mathematics and History to Robotics, Criminology and Marine-adjacent things like Oceanography.

The modern list is enormous, and it keeps growing, because a school subject is just a chunk that somebody decided to carve knowledge into, and knowledge can be carved a great many ways. It has not always looked like this. For most of Western history the entire curriculum, the whole of what an educated person studied, was seven subjects, and two of the seven would surprise you.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you are deciding, more if you are browsing.
2. Press Generate. A fresh draw every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

The whole curriculum was once seven subjects

From classical antiquity through the Middle Ages, the educated person studied the seven liberal arts, and that was the curriculum. Not a core of seven with options around it. Seven, complete.

They were called liberal not in any political sense but from the Latin liber, free, because they were considered the studies proper to a free person, as opposed to the practical trades that prepared someone to earn a living. They were the training of the mind, the thinking skills, and they were split into two groups with names still worth knowing.

The first three were the trivium, from the Latin for "three roads". Grammar, the mechanics of language. Logic, the mechanics of reasoning. Rhetoric, the art of using language to persuade. These came first, because they were the tools you needed before you could study anything else. Learn to read a text carefully, reason about it soundly, and argue your conclusions clearly, and you were equipped to begin.

The next four were the quadrivium, the "four roads", and this is where a modern eye starts to widen. The four were arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Music. Astronomy. Sitting not as enrichment, not as options, but as two of the four advanced core subjects of all higher study, alongside the mathematics, for the better part of two thousand years. A person was not considered properly educated without them. Both are in the list this generator draws from, and most people meet them today as a nice extra and a niche science. For most of the history of education they were pillars.

Music was a branch of mathematics

The presence of music in that group of four is not a charming accident, and understanding why it is there is the most illuminating thing in this whole story.

The four subjects of the quadrivium were not four random advanced topics. They were understood as four kinds of number, and the scheme is elegant enough to be worth stating exactly as the medieval world saw it.

Arithmetic was number in the abstract, number in itself. Geometry was number in space, quantity given shape. Astronomy was number in space and time, the mathematics of things moving through the heavens. And music was number in time: quantity unfolding as you listen.

Music belonged with mathematics because, to these thinkers, it was mathematics. The insight goes back to Pythagoras and the discovery that harmony is arithmetic you can hear. Pluck a string, then stop it at exactly half its length, and the note leaps up by an octave. Two thirds of the length gives a perfect fifth. The intervals that sound beautiful together turn out to be the simple whole-number ratios, and the ones that sound harsh are the awkward ratios. Consonance is not a matter of taste. It is number, arriving through the ear instead of the eye.

So a student studying music in the quadrivium was not learning to play an instrument. They were studying the mathematics of ratio and proportion, using sound as the place where number became audible, in the same spirit that they used the stars to study number in motion. Music was a mathematical science, and it kept that status, formally, for two thousand years. The idea that it is a soft or artistic subject, the first thing cut when budgets tighten, would have struck an educated person of almost any earlier century as bizarre. They filed it next to geometry.

The subjects we call trivial

There is a fossil of this whole system hiding in an ordinary English word, and once you know it is there you will never quite unsee it.

The word is trivial.

It comes straight from the trivium, the first three subjects. The trivium was the elementary stage, the groundwork you did before the harder quadrivium, and something belonging to that beginner stage came to be called trivial. From "belonging to the trivium" to "elementary" to "of little importance", the word slid down the centuries until it arrived at its modern meaning of unimportant, while quietly carrying the entire structure of the medieval curriculum inside it.

So every time anyone calls something trivial, they are unknowingly gesturing at a thousand-year-old syllabus, and specifically at its opening three subjects, the grammar and logic and rhetoric that a medieval student cleared before being allowed near the mathematics of the heavens.

That fossil is a good way to feel what the modern list really is. The subjects this generator hands you are not a fixed natural set. They are the current answer to an old and never-settled question: how should we cut knowledge into pieces a person can learn one at a time? The medieval answer was seven, with music beside arithmetic and astronomy at the summit. Ours runs to dozens, splits science into three, treats music as an art rather than a number, and adds new subjects every decade as new fields appear.

Neither answer is the true one, because there is no true one. There is only what a given age decided was worth separating out and giving a name and an hour on the timetable. The list is a snapshot of how we currently divide up everything there is to know, and, like the seven liberal arts before it, it will look quaint soon enough.

Where these come from

The subjects are drawn from a list our team assembled and curated by hand, covering the range of disciplines taught today. Your browser picks from them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

What were the seven liberal arts exactly?

The trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, followed by the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Together they formed the standard curriculum from classical antiquity through the medieval universities, taught roughly in that order, with the trivium as the foundation for the more advanced quadrivium.

Why was music grouped with mathematics?

Because it was understood as a mathematical science, the study of number unfolding in time. Musical harmony corresponds to simple whole-number ratios, a discovery traced back to Pythagoras, so studying music meant studying proportion and ratio through sound rather than learning to perform. It kept that mathematical status for around two thousand years.

Does "trivial" really come from "trivium"?

Yes. The trivium was the elementary opening stage of the liberal arts, and something belonging to that beginner stage came to be called trivial, drifting over time to mean elementary and then unimportant. The everyday word carries the structure of the old curriculum inside it.

Why are they called "liberal" arts?

From the Latin liber, meaning free. They were the studies considered appropriate for a free person, aimed at developing the mind, as distinct from the practical or vocational arts that trained someone for a specific trade. The word has nothing to do with its modern political sense.

Why are there so many subjects now?

Because knowledge has both grown and been divided more finely. Fields that did not exist in the medieval world, from computer science to psychology, have appeared, and older areas have split, with natural philosophy fracturing into physics, chemistry and biology. A school subject is a decision about how to carve up knowledge, and the number of workable cuts keeps rising.

References

1. Quadrivium. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium
2. Trivium. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium
3. The Seven Liberal Arts. Catholic Encyclopedia. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01760a.htm