What I hadn’t realized when I was in school was that a degree only takes maybe 12 courses The impossible ideal of a collegiate Classical education – an idea so beloved of so many university professors – has killed the spirit of autodidacticism that allowed many 19th- and 20th-century Americans to achieve the same result If, for each course, you read only 10 books (Stanford is on the quarter system, so each class was only 12 weeks long), then you get a degree by reading 120 books.