ACTA's Must-Reads
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The core scores
Last week, ACTA brought its ideas about how to restore a core curriculum to undergraduate education to the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Lots of people came to the panel, and the discussion period was substantive and useful. InsideHigherEd.com summarizes the panel here--but equally worthy of note are the comments from students and faculty about how valuable they have found their own experiences with a core curriculum.
Here is Matthew:
I was an undergraduate at Columbia, which has a core curriculum that is noted as a potential model for other schools in the above article. I found Columbia's "Core," as it is affectionately known, to be easily the best and most rewarding part of my undergraduate schooling. Most of my peers agreed with me--the Core was recently cited by its students as the major reason they would recommend their school to others in a book published on Columbia. And one can certainly think "critically" about and offer "diverse viewpoints" on these books. There was no political indoctrination. Well--I suppose someone will argue that being exposed to some of the greater literary achievements of humankind is a form of indoctrination. But I don't want to be educated by someone like that.
And here is Robert Hollander, emeritus professor of European history at Princeton:
Like Matthew, I had experience of the Columbia "core," or a part of it, the "great books" two-semester sequence, when I began teaching college students many years ago. Not only is he correct about the value of such courses for students, he might very well have sensed their value for us who teach them. My four years at Columbia were some of the happiest in my teaching life, and I will always be grateful to Marjorie Hope Nicolson, the Chairman (she would have been offended to have been referred to as "Chair" [some things DO change]) of my graduate department, for recommending me to the College in the first place. When I moved to Princeton, after a dozen years of frustration, I was able to persuade my colleagues to allow the creation of a version of that sequence, which is still being offered today (Humanistic Studies 205-206), and which I was fortunate to be involved in for some twenty-five years.What some proponents and detractors of such "traditional" courses fail to appreciate is the radical, at times intransigent, and surely varied positions that are found among such gatherings as include the philosophical views of Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, the authors read in the Old and New Testaments, Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Rousseau, and Nietzsche; or among the vastly differing epic worlds of Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton; or among the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Goethe; or among the fictions of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski. Not only are these texts compellingly interesting, relevant to concerns of most intelligent human beings, they do NOT, counter to the view of both opponents and champions of such courses (one suspects that many of these, on both sides of the issue, have not read many of these works), present a monolith of "Western values." Rather, their authors are among the sharpest critics of those values, and place their readers in the crucible of necessarily difficult thought. I can think of no better introduction to the world we live in than those texts, which will outlive us all, which will be relevant when we no longer are. And, as a bonus that is perhaps at the very core of their value, all of them are beautiful.
Of note, too, are the several commentators who deplore the polarized manner in which discussion about the curriculum has taken place, and who urge dialogue, compromise, and meeting in the middle.
Meanwhile, Harvard students are arguing for a core with a faculty that looks like it might not have the will to implement one:
The effort to revamp the core curriculum "will not amount to any meaningful change" unless the final General Education report includes more stringent guidelines about which courses will count under the new requirements, three undergraduate focus groups concluded yesterday.In a letter sent to the Task Force on General Education, the students expressed broad support for the task force's philosophy of general education as preparation for life after Harvard.
In contrast, the current core emphasizes exposure to different academic approaches to knowledge.
But the students expressed concern that the proposed categories could become little more than a renamed core.
Without concrete guidelines, "many professors will continue to teach a disproportionate number of overly specialized, specific classes that speak to their particular research interests rather than the more broadly stated goals of General Education," the letter reads.
It's good to see students take a stand on an issue that concerns them so directly--and it's good, too, to see the clarity with which they advocate for a curriculum that would be more challenging, more focussed, and more coherent than the one they currently have.
Posted by acta online at January 23, 2007 08:44 AM
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