Liberal Arts Undegrad at Ivies?

[tk21769]

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The whole foundation is that the mark of an educated person is not what you know, it is how you think and how well you’re able to learn what you do not know

On that, you and I agree. I venture to say, the adherents of either model would tend to agree as well.

While you talk about the quality of your courses at Chicago (and I have no doubt the Core works for Chicago), consider this model applied somewhere else.

Yes, ideally, a good model should be repeatable. If the GB model is good, it should work not only at St John’s College, but work (or be able to work) at other schools too. Or for that matter,in a book club. By that standard, I think the GB model has “worked” (by some definition) over and over again.</p>

<p>Exactly how well in each case? You’re right, that’s hard to say. But at least it is simple and repeatable. All you need is copies of a Great Book, a competent guide, and one or more willing students. I would not want to be too rigid in what I consider a Great Book, but on the other hand, I would not think just any old book will work equally well. Chomsky’s Aspects contains some very provocative ideas; it may have revolutionized how people thought about language and the mind; any professional Linguist (or anyone seriously interested in the study of language) ought to read it at least once. However, to meet the general education needs of college students, I think many of the 100 or so books in the St. John’s canon would be richer sources of discussion material. Moreover, to get the most out of Chomsky,it wouldn’t be a bad idea to grapple with Descartes and Hume first. </p>

<p>Though, I can see the merits of encouraging a certain kind of student, right from the start in college, to dig into Noam Chomsky. And a good teacher could lead an interesting discussion about learning and creativity starting from Noam Chomsky. </p>

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There is very little oversight as to how these courses are taught to ensure that it is all about process with the material and not the material itself.

I can’t speak for every school. I think that at Chicago, there is actually quite a bit of oversight.</p>

<p>There is certainly an enormous amount of talk about the implications of the Core and the content of the Core. Every so many years, there is a fairly significant overhaul. This is a community process of adaptation.</p>

<p>The most important oversight, in my opinion, is the oversight that happens in the classroom. That’s how Socratic instruction works. Several of my teachers had been taught by a prior (even pre-Chomsky!) generation of gifted teachers at Chicago, so they’d been observed to “get” the process before they were invited to teach. Other, younger teachers came in from other places and did not necessarily do as good a job in leading dialog. Over time, one hopes, they improve. But yes – there probably needs to be better oversight there, to ensure it happens.<br>

The faculty at Brown are not in place to “temper passion”, but rather to give students the ability to channel that passion constructively by providing students with the tools they need to be able to construct strong arguments, identify the merits and flaws in the arguments of others, learn new material in depth they had never been exposed to, etc.

That’s what I meant by tempering passion. I do believe we agree.</p>

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You may find this interesting …

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<p>I’m sure to find it interesting. Thank you. I am glad to hear (though not surprised to hear) that students and faculty at Brown are engaged in continually reexamining the meaning of liberal learning. This is a process that has been going on at Chicago, too, for many many years.</p>

<p>(And thanks iDad for your posts. Earlier today, I ordered a copy of the Levine book you cited above. Yes, those are good clarifications about “departments” at Chicago, one could wander around the College for a while before noticing, “Oh, something’s missing!”)</p>