The Coursification Of Everyday Life

The ad found me while I was scrolling through Instagram with a mix of boredom and resentment. The 10-chapter course, “Flavour-Packed Sandwiches”, promised to help me master “the fundamentals of sandwich design and raise my sandwich game.” Or something like that.

Apparently, “the thing about a sandwich is, every single bite you take is the exact same. That means every bite has to be perfectly thought out and layered.”

If the stakes are so high for a humble sandwich, then a programme of in-depth study feels not only justified but essential. Where do I sign up?

I wondered if the course was specifically for people who run cafes and restaurants. But no. It was for anyone “in pursuit of sandwich perfection.” Amateur or professional. Take my money now.

Maybe I’ve been doing sandwiches wrong my whole life and this is my last chance to raise my game. I can’t afford to be some kind of sandwich-making imposter.

The Coursification of Life

I’m a firm believer in life-long learning. Education is the path to freedom. Courses can be a powerful way to enhance our skills and improve our lives.

But lately, I’ve started to notice that every domestic task has been coursified. Even the most mundane and everyday chores, like making a sandwich, now come packaged as snazzy courses, with high-resolution graphics and anxiety-inducing marketing copy. Courses for sewing. For cleaning. For the most basic of DIY repair.

It makes me wonder how we ever learned anything before.

A Life of Sandwich Making

My sandwich journey started with watching my parents. We ate some kind of sandwich every day. Chile has a spectacular sandwich culture. But it wasn’t just things between slices of bread.

I approached learning about sandwiches the same way I approached learning about gardening, or mending clothes, or repairing things around the house. With childlike curiosity.

It might sound like I grew up in some kind of child labour trade school. Okay, it was like that at times. Maybe a little too often. Working-class childhoods were like that back then. But I also went to where my parents were. Gravitated to what they did. Absorbed the knowledge they offered.

That curiosity persisted into adulthood. Every delicious and compelling sandwich was a learning experience. The steak baguette from Robuchon Tea House in Hong Kong, the haggis toastie I used to buy from a food truck opposite Arisugawa Koen in Tokyo, or the banh mi from my local Vietnamese bakery in Adelaide. I would study each sandwich to see what made it work.

Perhaps I’m making my journey sound luxurious and extravagant by name dropping and location bragging. But the board brush strokes of this kind of journey – youthful experiences, adult experiments – are not unusual. Many of us learnt this way. Trial and error. Replicating what we saw and loved. Making it our own.

What Changed?

But did we always learn that way? Or did something change between then and now?

The Coursification of Everyday Life is more than just the transmission of information. We’ve always had books and training manuals. Newsagents used to be full of magazines with DIY examples, patterns for sewing and knitting, recipes, and even ideas for making sandwiches.

Coursification suggests something is missing beyond just the transmission of information.

The “Flavour-Packed Sandwiches” course suggests we lack something beyond recipes or suggestions on how to plate the things we cook. We lack the concept of what makes a sandwich great. A cultural and philosophical deficit. We’ve reached adulthood missing a fundamental building block of civilisation.

Fragmented Bonds of Learning

I exaggerate. But maybe only a little. Perhaps something has fundamentally changed. Fractured. Or at the very least fragmented.

That working-class environment I grew up in was based on the idea of the master and the apprentice. You learn by observing, watching, being shown how to do things. You don’t just acquire discrete bits of knowledge. You are schooled in a system, a philosophy, a way of making things. It’s a path to mastery.

Learning is different today. The student’s journey is what matters. They piece together the knowledge they need as they need it. There is no overarching philosophy, just tasks that need to be completed. The student directs their learning experience.

I’m not going to suggest what I grew up with was better. Comparing how philosophies of education have evolved would be a huge task. And there was plenty wrong with the kind of learning environment I grew up in. Little room for individual creativity. Lots of space for abusive behaviour from teachers and those in positions of authority.

But I still finding myself wondering whether the coursification of everyday life is something that should give us pause.

Have we witnessed the breaking of the social bonds that connect education to participation in society more broadly? Have we been so fixated on coaching kids for success in the competitive worlds of academia and work that we didn’t prepare them to live self-directed domestic lives?

I ask these questions with trepidation, knowing that, in our moment, those who robe themselves in the values of community and tradition are often wanting to drag us back to darker times.

But the questions persist.

The Amplification of Comparison

I also wonder why it all matters so much. Who cares if I’m not maximising my sandwich game? Why should I worry if one bite of my sandwich isn’t as magically identical as every other bite?

Whose judgement and shame would I be experiencing?

In one sense it would be my own shame. My own expectation of being excellent at every aspect of life. But also, there is the infinite chorus of voices, the people we’ve met, the ones we haven’t but who still speak (or scream) in our direction from the various corners of the internet.

Even if our sandwiches are perfectly fine and deliciously tasty, there’s always someone out there whose sandwiches look better, in person or in photos posted online, and so we sign up for another course.