<p>Agree, which is why I think the Scripps approach is superior to that taken at UChicago (where I taught “core”), Reed, and Columbia. They have come to the tentative conclusion that the debate ABOUT the core is more important than the core “content” itself:</p>
<p>“This course looks at the interrelations between culture(s) and knowledge, focusing on the ways our beliefs about the world are represented in human creations (all human creations, from music to molecular biology, from macroeconomics to myth). These human creations are what we mean by “representations”: they embody our beliefs, re-presenting them in a variety of forms. Over the past 20 years, academic thinking about these interrelations has changed, and there is now disagreement both inside and outside colleges and universities over many questions: Do our cultural commitments affect our perception of the truth? If so, to what extent? Do our cultural representations simply reflect our beliefs, or do they determine what those beliefs are? Are some cultures better than other cultures because their ways of life are more firmly based on “objective truth”?”</p>
<p>EKitty - started taking the kids to GreenStage Shakespeare when they were 8 - always a big hit, even for younger one, who has to roam during the performances.</p>
<p>Of the many contemporary film versions of the Odyssey, my daughter enjoyed the Coen Brothers’ version, “Oh, Brother Where Art Thou”.</p>
<p>And then there is the Kafkaesque version of “Romeo and Juliet” that was made recently. The original Shakespeare text set into a Los Angeles gang setting.</p>
<p>I have to admit I even enjoyed Claire Danes and :cough: Leo Decaprio in R & J
although I still havent seen the Olivia Hussey version that I was forbidden to see when it came out because I was too young.</p>
<p>My younger daughters former K-12 public school goes to the Ashland Shakespeare festival every year- alternating between middle and high schools. They go for a week , camp, and see at least 3 plays.
True story
The Romeo & Juliet version they saw in 7th grade was very modern, so modern that instead of a dagger they used a handgun.
When Juliet shot herself, you could have heard a pin drop. My daughters best friend, who apparently wasnt familar with the story could be heard to exclaim " * SHE DIES* ? "!</p>
I’m sure that requirement is much the same throughout the country. But evidently at Dartmouth, Penn, and other elite schools where I’ve read of similar such student surveys as the one published in the Review, “top” students need a lot of remedial work before they’re ready to choose Chinese history or Shintoism over those things they should have mastered in high school. Even those who had a decent high school education would benefit from studying those subjects again in more depth, at a higher level.</p>
<p>We could just turn college into College Board administered AP tests. Then, we could pay $40k per year for our kids to take nothing but test-prep courses, just like in high school, with the end result being memorization of a specified set of historical “facts”. Kind of like the expensive version of the Mass. MCAT testing that is the bane of real education.</p>
<p>Personally, I’d rather see my D spend a semester pondering why a seemingly simple issue like Rwandan genocide is not simple at all, but rather a complex equation that involves colonial history, old-fashioned struggles for power, sociological factors necessary for a widespread acceptance of brutality in a country, and many aspects of historic and contemporary western politics.</p>
<p>Or, an understanding that issues related to radical Islam, terrorism, and the entire Middle East are not simple, either – but rather complex equations with no easy answers.</p>
<p>Maybe a good compromise would be to spend the first couple of days at college memorizing facts for a standardized test written by ISI and The Dartmouth Review. Congress could pass a law withholding student aid from anyone failing to pass this test.</p>
<p>“I’m sure that requirement is much the same throughout the country. But evidently at Dartmouth, Penn, and other elite schools where I’ve read of similar such student surveys as the one published in the Review, “top” students need a lot of remedial work before they’re ready to choose Chinese history or Shintoism over those things they should have mastered in high school.”</p>
<p>Well, I read it differently. They all covered the “core curriculum” and it didn’t stick. That’s probably because they never figured out why it should make any difference, and in reality, for the great majority of them, it didn’t. Hardly an argument for making them repeat it.</p>
<p>“Some” students would benefit from it; for other, obviously, based on actual reported experience, as above, it would be a waste of time.</p>
<p>I think folks get too hung-up on the content because it is a “stand in” for another agenda - or at least it is for ISI. The reality is that for the vast majority of college-educated adults, they don’t feel the lack of a core curriculum. This is clearly someone else’s neo-Victorian agenda. That their lives would be enriched by reading Dante I don’t doubt (I have GRAVE doubts about the Aeneid); no more so than reading the Ramayana (which has more contemporary applications).</p>
<p>One of the things I learned early in looking at the core as taught at Chicago (or at Reed) - you could read the entire Roman canon of bad novels (Apuleius and Patronius), mediocre poetry (Aeneid), or indifferent philosophy, and never meet up with the single individual who had by far the greatest impact on Roman history post the 2nd century B.C., without whom the republic may not have fallen, Julius Caesar never come to power, and the Roman legions never have reached the heights they did.</p>
<p>His name? Spartacus. A Bulgarian to boot.</p>
<p>(And, with the possible exception of Petronius, you’d never have a clue as to how people in Rome actually managed to exist.)</p>
One way to do that would be to study–rather than memorize facts–the history that has led to the civilization where most people today yearn to live, and to appreciate what a long hard struggle it was to get here.</p>
Personally I think people get too hung up on ISI, and see agendas on every grassy knoll. It’s just a college guide, if you don’t want to read it, don’t. But to reject anything they say, just because they say it, is closed-minded. There are other examples of programs that work toward the same end, a thorough knowledge of how we got where we are. Anyway, Columbia’s program pre-dates ISI by over 30 years.</p>
<p>And represents the same neo-Victorian thinking dating back to Matthew Arnold - you can actually date with precision the beginning of the core curriculum (1869) with the publication of “Culture and Anarchy”, and plot why England (and then the U.S.) moved in that direction.</p>
<p>Reading a particular group of books is no guarantee, and may even work against, coming to a better understanding of who we came to be who we are, or where we are today. There are, however, core “ways of knowing” and of creating. The content itself can be a great means to an end, and reading great books (from whatever time and civilization) is one terrific way of getting there; it can also be used to devalue not just other civilizations, or even approaches to our own (as I noted early), but other ways of knowing.</p>
<p>Actually, I think the opposite could be argued. It is the exclusive focus on Western European Anglo-Saxon history from the time of the Crusades on that makes it so difficult for us to understand the underpinnings of Islamic/Middle East, African, and Far Eastern struggles today. We are forever trying to use the only “construct” we know to understand issues that don’t cleanly fit that construct.</p>
Well, Columbia moved in the opposite direction during Arnold’s time, doing away with many requirements starting around 1880, and beginning to sound much more like modern universities. It wasn’t until after WWI, after some discussions with John Dewey, that the then Columbia president began moving Columbia in the direction of the form we see today. There’s no mention of Arnold that I’ve found yet, but the history and ideas behind the movememt makes an interesting read.</p>
A thorough course of study on Western Civ goes much farther back than the crusades. In fact, that’s the whole point of studying the Rennaissance carefully–the rebirth of great ideas that were lost in medieval times. It also provides a point of reference for understanding that in many ways, the Middle East remains stuck in the Medieval era. Personally, I would feel better about the future of our representative system if our young citizens had a clue about how it works and where it came from.
[Why do I feel like I’m playing Australian Doubles this afternoon :)]</p>
<p>History at Chicago with Maynard Hutchins is also interesting. The most modern discussion was at Scripps, as it was completed, I think, in 1999.</p>
<p>I hope you don’t think I am arguing against colleges having a core, even in their content. I am not. I think having diversity in choices is absolutely wonderful. What I am arguing against is that there is a “canon” that is either 1) necessary, or 2) particularly important in making one a useful, productive, and intelligent citizen able to make good choices both for themselves and their communities, or 3) that ensures cultural literacy, especially in a society as multi-cultural and multi-faceted as our own.</p>
<p>I’m against it on purely pragmatic grounds. When you force all 400, 1000, or 5000 freshmen to take exactly the same courses, you inevitably end up with very large lecture classes. As long as the coffee on campus in strong enough, this setting is perfectly adequate for memorizing a core set of facts. However, I’m not convinced that this is the most effective way for kids to learn critical thinking, effective writing, verbal skills, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t recall any big problem with the distribution requirements when I was in college. Sure, a few kids probably didn’t get a broad-based liberal arts education. But, that was no skin off my teeth. As a conservative, I’m happy to leave it as a matter of personal responsibility rather than having some “bureau of standards” dictate the course selection for every college student.</p>
<p>Driver:</p>
<p>Careful menioning Dewey. His book also received votes for one of the most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries from the panel of conservative “scholars”.</p>
<p>My argument is that if students want to go to a college with a content core, they should have the opportunity to choose one. (then the dialogue switches to what should be “in” the core, rather than whether.) Diversity is good! Just no need to push it on everyone, especially when its intellectual underpinnings are in fact so shallow. It works at Scripps because they are so tiny - 200 or so in the first-year class, and they use their big auditorium for the weekly lecture, and then break up into small discussion sections for two meetings a week (and lots of writing). </p>
<p>I thought the distibution requirements at Billstown were an absurdity. If they were selecting a class of students who were intellectually curious, it shouldn’t be necessary. I think a writing requirement (and probably an applied math one) is not a bad idea, but outside of that, I don’t think there’s virtually anything that should be required of “all” students. And if you do your homework, you can choose: students who want a core “canon” can go to Reed or St. John’s or Columbia; students who don’t want a foreign language requirement can go to Billstown, etc. </p>
<p>No, IDad, they are not lecture classes. Lit Hum and Contemporary Civ are each capped at 22 students. The focus is on discussion, not “memorizing facts”.</p>
<p>David Denby wrote a great book (called Great Books) on sitting in with these classes for a year, decades after taking them himself. It gives you the flavor of what they felt like. My S adored his Lit Hum class this year because he’s a talker. It sure isn’t a dead canon, either–he read Woolf, Doestoevsky, Nabokov, and Austen, among others. (Never expected to hear my sports/video game loving son tell me that Elizabeth Bennet was pretty cool.)</p>
<p>There’s also a “Major Cultures” component to the Core, where they have to take two courses about other cultures outside the western canon. They can make choices there–more like a distribution requirement.</p>
<p>Also, they have to pass a swimming test! :)</p>
<p>Additionally, Idon’t see why this is an either/or. My D’s experience at Wes was much like your D’s at Swarthmore. It’s not in any way inferior; it’s just different.</p>
<p>In fact, I’d like to go back and attend each of my kids schools for awhile; they’re both wonderful, wonderful places where true learning takes place, Core or no.</p>