Null Curriculum Network

Nothing to Prove • Everything to Learn • Knowledge for the People

Salve,

and welcome to the Null Curriculum Network. You truly honor this project with your presence.

Written by William Ellison, MBA, BS

What is the NCN?

You are about to embark on a journey across the great human intellectual tradition. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read broadly and deeply, to ponder your place in the universe, and to consider your place alongside your fellow man. By joining us on this quest, you will be the latest person to step into the pantheon of humanity’s greatest thinkers: people of flesh and blood who answered the same impulse you are about to answer. If you approach this project with a curious mind and a sincere heart, you stand to gain far more than mere words can express.

The Null Curriculum Network is an attempt to illuminate the corners of human knowledge that have become darkened in recent decades. The nine questions at the Network’s core are an earnest attempt to understand the nature of human inquiry, and variants of these are probably questions you’ve asked yourself over the course of your life. These are questions your formal schooling likely left unanswered – on purpose, whether due to short-sighted legislation, poorly trained teachers, underfunded districts, student apathy, or cultural and technological shifts.

The nine questions we address are eternal; none of them has a definitive answer. Everything we do here is in a sincere attempt to ask them better – and to answer them to the best of our abilities.

What is it not?

While we do co-opt the structure of the university, it is vitally important that you understand that the Null Curriculum Network is not an institution of higher learning. We do not have the legal authority or institutional accreditation to furnish degrees, diplomas, or course credit. This project serves as a framework for acquiring knowledge, but you gain nothing in return aside from your own satisfaction.

NCN is not a platform; we do not run courses or provide for a community here. Formation of a learning community and direction of courses is the responsibility of the learner.

What NCN provides

The nature of what we provide at the Null Curriculum Network is threefold:

  1. A scaffold for intellectual inquiry in the form of the Nine Questions;
  2. A blueprint for studying the liberal arts in the form of our Curricula; and,
  3. A roadmap within the disciplines we cover in the form of our Reading Lists.

None of these is to be considered authoritative. We provide recommendations and suggestions based on ideas already out there in the world. If those recommendations and suggestions don’t land with you, then don’t follow them.

How to engage meaningfully with the content

If you truly want to engage meaningfully with the scaffolds, blueprints, and roadmaps presented here, we recommend five primary pillars of engagement:

  1. Read deeply. When you read a work, take the time to appreciate and understand the nature of its language. Question not only what the author is saying, but what underlying assumptions they are making with the work.
  2. Read broadly. Read a variety of works across a variety of disciplines, from a variety of traditions, and by a variety of authors. In this way, you will understand the general currents of thought through the ages and how they have changed with the passage of time.
  3. Engage with the content in good faith. Approach works with the intention to learn from them. Do not assume that just because you disagree with the thesis of a work that you will have nothing to learn from it. Nothing could, in general, be further from the truth.
  4. Refrain from relying upon the thoughts of others. Do your best to understand the work using only what you have been given; refrain from relying excessively on resources such as Cliff’s Notes and Schaum’s Outlines if you can help it. (There are some exceptions, which will be identified in NCN course materials.)
  5. Uphold intellectual and academic honesty. Do not, under any circumstances, pass off others’ ideas as your own, and when you invoke someone else’s idea, do so with proper attribution to the thinker who birthed your idea.

Alternative recommendations

The approach suggested here is not for everyone. If you are still in your compulsory education and want greater enrichment, I suggest starting with your teachers at school. If they cannot or will not provide you with what you seek, then I suggest coming back to NCN and reviewing our General Education curriculum or advancing straight into one of the six subject-specific curricula as suits your fancy.

If you’d like to listen to lectures, then I suggest these sources:

  1. Open Yale Courses
  2. MIT OpenCourseWare
  3. The free courses at Harvard Professional and Lifelong Learning
  4. Auditing courses at Coursera
  5. Looking for university professors on YouTube, as several upload their lectures or other videos on their subjects

If you find greater interactivity beneficial (especially useful for STEM subjects), I will eagerly recommend Brilliant.org and Khan Academy. I have used Khan Academy to considerable benefit for relearning mathematics through single-variable calculus.

And if you just want different recommendations, then the ever wonderful Jo Shaw has you covered. She has compiled a rather lengthy list of free educational resources on YouTube that center around the humanities. You can see that list on her Substack. I’m a huge fan of her work and I consider her YouTube channel criminally underrated; if you vibe with NCN, you’ll probably vibe with her channel.

Lastly, if you do wish to advance your education with an actual credential, then may I suggest starting your journey at your local community college or, if that is not an option for you, at a site that confers transfer credit like Study.com. The credits you earn at Study.com can be transferred to a university like Thomas Edison State University, American Public University, Columbia Southern University, or Southern New Hampshire University, where you can complete a bachelor’s degree in the field of your choosing. For the student with a serious interest in the liberal arts, I would suggest SNHU, APU, or TESU, as they offer surprisingly robust degree programs in several liberal arts disciplines that are available entirely online. (APU’s BA in Philosophy and BS in Mathematics, TESU’s BA in Sociology and BA in Psychology, and SNHU’s BA and MA in English are particularly nice programs by the standards of online universities. All three schools offer strong business and IT programs, too, even though that is not our main focus here at NCN.) I’d also like to recommend Newlane University, a new university with an ethos that strongly accords with NCN’s mission and which charges only $1,500 per degree.

I’d also like to recommend the various proprietary business degrees available at the European Business School of Barcelona (ENEB). For less than $1,500, you can complete a master’s degree in any of several areas of business, including management, human resources, finance, marketing, and technology. While these vocational degrees are not truly germane to NCN’s mission, they can be quite useful for a variety of purposes since they are often considered equivalent to an American bachelor’s degree by foreign credential evaluators. I completed the Master of Business Administration + Master of Financial Markets and Asset Management qualification by examination in January 2026.

Fossil record (Revision history)

January 29, 2026: Initial revision.