Carleton, UChicago, Washu

rlmmail
Fri, 02 Aug 2013 15:21:27 +0000

I like your thinking on this, Impero. I don’t think a core curriculum has to be rigid. (Though my son is at UChicago and has been very happy with the core, though now he’s also happy to be done with the core courses.) But I do think that in general most students are deprived of something if there is not a required core. If a “curriculum” is merely a vehicle for maximal individualism (e.g. Brown), then what happens to the experience of the school as a community of learners who are grappling with a common or at least significantly overlapping set of ideas and works? This is mostly lost when there are just a few large distribution requirement buckets.

Former Harvard Dean, Harry Lewis, wrote a book discussing this–“Excellence Without a Soul.” He argues that one of the best things a school can give students is a minimum set of works and subjects that they should learn. When a school does not do this, it is basically saying that it doesn’t even know (or more likely simply can’t decide due to faculty in-fighting and turf battles). A side-effect of this, according to Lewis, is that it creates a “race to the bottom,” where students simply try to find the easiest “A’s” that they can, and the quality and coherence of students’ education declines.