Humanovus
— Victor Hugo, 1840
Understand the great works.
Structure your thinking.
Walk through the ages.
The French tradition of culture and method.
An education for teenagers and adults.
Designed by agrégés — France's most credentialed teachers.
Guided by a Socratic AI.
The full breadth of human civilization, from its earliest traces to the present.
Each period explored through its great works — five disciplines combined:
Designed by agrégés — France's most credentialed teachers — in the French humanist tradition.
Guided by Mnemon, a Socratic AI.
Original sources. Written analyses.
Walk the full arc, or begin with the period of your choice.
How it works
5 to 10 lessons per period · 45 minutes each · At your own pace
Two levels — Discovery (13-15) and Formation (16+)
Individualized evaluation at the end of each period
First journey (The Ancient World) opens January 2027
Also available in French: La Méthode — reading, writing, and structured thought in the French tradition.
For the teenager eager to go deeper — in school or homeschooled — and for the parent who encourages it.
For the adult who feels part of their education was left unfinished.
— Marianne Irissou, founder Read the full letter →"I taught for twenty years — from neighborhood middle schools to elite high schools, from public universities to private higher education, across France, Finland, Mexico, and the United States. Everywhere, I saw the same thing: students capable of far more than what was asked of them. What is missing is not content. It is depth. Humanovus is my attempt to return it."
Humanovus brings together, for the first time, the French pedagogical tradition, built on the ambition of knowledge, and an artificial intelligence designed to serve it, not to betray it.
Agrégés — France's most credentialed teachers — design the content, with the counsel and validation of academic experts.
Most online educational tools are designed by product or data specialists who treat pedagogy as an afterthought. Humanovus draws on long, hands-on pedagogical experience and an intimate knowledge of the technology industry — the very one Humanovus runs counter to. Its vision is humanist: to form the individual for their own sake, enabling them to think, to judge, to express themselves.
Humanovus gives the great works, today often neglected or abridged, the attention they deserve, and situates them within the broader landscape of human thought.
Learning to read, to think, to write, and to speak in the classical French tradition. A discipline that shapes the mind as few others do.
Common uses of AI bypass learning and sidestep thought. Mnemon and Madame Termes do the opposite. In the manner of Socrates, they ask the questions that draw out thinking, and leave the work of thought to the learner.
At a time when a machine can write for you, knowing how to write becomes all the more urgent. It is through writing that one learns to think.
At the heart of Humanovus are educators — convinced, since Montaigne, that all knowledge begins in humility; that to read the great works is to take part in the highest conversation of minds; that the end of education is the formation of a free mind — curious, able to judge, to admire, to doubt, alive with the joy of learning.
This is the intelligence Humanovus defends, now grown rare. Not a utilitarian education that prepares for a profession, but an education for the life of the mind: the encounter with the masterworks, the French method of reasoning, the taste for questioning.
At Humanovus, teachers and experts design the courses: choice of materials, conduct of analyses, formulation of questions and exercises. They have also chosen to place AI in the service of this humanism. Here it has but one role: to give each person what a good teacher would give if only they had the time. It individualizes guidance, returns patiently to what has not been understood, and — through the Socratic method — pushes each person to think further than they would on their own. What it never does: write for you, summarize what you have not read, conclude before you have thought.
It takes shape in two figures, one for La Méthode, the other for Les Traversées.
Guide to La Méthode · French only
Her name declares her demand. To define one's terms: a Cartesian inheritance. Madame Termes reads what you write, attends to grammar, syntax, and spelling, and stirs your thinking — questioning, pushing, persisting until your thinking has gone as far as it can go.
Discover La Méthode (French only) →
Guide to The Journeys
From the Greek mnémè, memory. Mnemon carries everything the great civilizations have thought, created, and passed on. He brings you to the works and asks the questions that drive thinking deeper.
Discover The Journeys →Humanovus opens in January 2027 with La Méthode and the first journey: The Ancient World. The first cohort will be deliberately small — the first participants will be few and followed closely. If what you have read speaks to you, write to us. We reply personally.
“We may be learned with other men’s knowledge; we can only be wise with our own wisdom.”
Montaigne — Essays, I, 24 — On Pedantry