Introducing the Lost Knowledge Project.
Professors and instructors at colleges, universities, and K-12 institutions are self-censoring. They carefully curate their syllabi to ensure that course content elicits little to no offense on the part of students. Some instructors may take these precautions because they worry about losing their job, but many stay alert to potential offense that may arise from what and how they teach because they want to avoid conflicts with students. They are conducting risk assessments, and if the risks are too high, they won’t teach the content. If they miscalculate the risks and the mood of the class goes sour after a particular topic is introduced, or the instructor gets reported to administrators, they will likely scrap the topic the next semester because the risks outweigh the rewards.
This sort of self-censorship comes at great costs to the educators and the students. Teaching becomes unenjoyable, and much of the rich, deep knowledge that instructors possess goes unknown to students. Students miss out on precisely the knowledge they are attending school to receive. And rather than enjoy the benefit of education to learn new perspectives and engage with new ideas, cutting content that might be controversial just makes students more certain that their worldviews are correct. As they know less and less, they become surer and surer that there’s nothing out there that conflicts with their ideologies, and education becomes more and more depleted.
Why subscribe?
Knowledge is key to a prosperous people and society, and the Lost Knowledge Project aims to help preserve the knowledge that is discarded due to self-censorship.
Subscribe to have every tidbit of the rich knowledge we preserve sent directly to your inbox.
Share your lost knowledge
We invite professors of all stripes (assistant, associate, full, adjunct), graduate student instructors, and K-12 teachers to submit material that you have removed from your syllabi because the risks of offending students outweighed the benefits of teaching the content. We want to preserve your knowledge and offer students a chance to access the material the censors deprived them of.
If you teach at a college, university, or secondary school (middle or high school) and would like to add your lost knowledge to the repository, please fill out this Google form. All information will be kept confidential—we will not identify you by name or institution unless you grant us permission to do so.
The form asks for:
The name of the course (if the course title will reveal your identity, you can make up a title that gives the readers a sense of the topic).
A description of (1,500 words max):
What content you cut from the course.
Why you decided to cut the content (i.e., what were you worried about).
What students will miss out on as a result of cutting the content (i.e., what value was lost)?
Links that showcase the content (e.g., slide shows, activity sheets, etc.) and/or citations for articles or books that you opted to exclude.
The moderators of the Lost Knowledge Project will review your submission and follow up with any questions or requests for additional information. You will be notified if we do or do not decide to publish your materials and, if we decide to publish, when you can expect them to be published. All submissions are subject to light editing for the sake of clarity. Please allow approximately three weeks for review and editing.
