Ever since I’ve removed myself from what is probably the most popular app at our school—TikTok—I have found myself relying on another source of entertainment, Instagram Reels. Although I wish my habit of mindlessly scrolling disappeared by deleting TikTok, it didn’t. But this time, I’m grateful.
If I had stopped, I wouldn’t have found out the truth about singer Taylor Swift, or more specifically her secret teaching career. Okay, not really, but metaphorically, her songs have now been disseminated into the content being learned in college-level classes.
This new sensation with Taylor Swift is the literal definition of the “Generation Z Curriculum.”
I never thought this day would finally come because when the world was under quarantine, all I’d ever see on TikTok were videos of people talking about what students would ‘potentially’ learn 60 years from now.
Taylor Swift as a curriculum is the literal definition of “Generation Z Courses.”
According to an article titled “Swiftology: Universities Are “Enchanted” With Taylor Swift by erudera.com a list of colleges that incorporate the subject of Taylor Swift within their curriculum goes as follows.
- Arizona State University
- Binghamton University
- Berklee College of Music in Boston
- Ghent University in Belgium
- New York University
- Rice University
- Stanford University
- University of Texas at Austin
Even though these aren’t all of the universities in the world, it makes me enthusiastic about what type of curriculum colleges will teach by the time I enter college in 2024. Additionally, I also wonder since all of the colleges listed above are outside the state of Michigan, will more colleges incorporate Taylor Swift into their courses or will these colleges add more classes that are Taylor Swift-oriented?
Some of the courses are more related to her music and how they use literary devices, others are more related to other subjects; one being psychology.
For example, schools such as Ghent University and Stanford University are offering classes in both literature and social psychology that specifically focus on Swift’s impact from the lyrics in her songs and even the discography of her music.
To give another example, NYU also offers a literature course on Taylor Swift that studies her music and the cultural context in which her career is situated and attempts to understand different writing styles, such as poetic form.
Now despite the fact that Taylor is one celebrity that has courses dedicated to her at only a few select universities. My hope in the future is that a course on all singers and songwriters, or just anyone famous in general, has a course on them that would be available to take at any university in the world.
She’s not my favorite singer, but maybe she could be if I got to learn more about her in either my school or college curriculum, and I hope that one day her as a person will be studied more in depth.
