The Argument
Why Carroll. Why now.
"Carroll was a mathematician at Christ Church Oxford. He did not write nonsense. He wrote logic wearing a costume — because logic in a costume is something a child will follow all the way to the bottom of the argument."
There is a story economists tell about a problem that cannot be solved from the top down. Friedrich Hayek called it the Knowledge Problem. Lewis Carroll dramatised it in 1865, in a story about a girl at a tea party where time had stopped and nobody could explain why — except that it had always been this way and questioning it was not encouraged.
Dorothy Sayers stood at Oxford in 1947 and called for a return to teaching children not what to think, but how. She was describing what Carroll had already done. She was also describing, without knowing it, what a small group of economists had been doing since the 1870s in Vienna.
This curriculum sits at the intersection of those three traditions. The goal is not a student who knows about Bitcoin. The goal is a student who knows how to follow a question all the way to the bottom — and come back changed.
Lewis Carroll
Dorothy Sayers
Carl Menger
Friedrich Hayek
Ludwig von Mises
Murray Rothbard
