<p>Ramaswami, these boards are swarming with people who like ot post around from other colleges on various pages and assert their models unnecessarily on other locations. It's a multiple time a day event that a student who never looked at Brown starts talking about what Brown is.</p>
<p>I take issue not when people simply discuss ideas out loud, but when in doing so, they put down Brown in such a way that makes it obvious they're not here and haven't really gotten what we're about. I have no problem with people favoring one system over another for various reasons, but I can't stand when people jump on pre-frosh and try to tell them what Brown does or doesn't provide. </p>
<p>In my original post I conceded and mentioned that common experience is of value. What you posted was that a school that did not provide the Great Books or an extensive core on Western heritage missed the point of university and would not present you with "training of the mind in being fully human and contemplative of itself, its humanness and the sensory world around, if it is perennial self-renewal and cultivation and not merely furnishing the mind with contents...". This implied that being at Brown was about , "partying...happiness...prestige... setting".</p>
<p>That statement is egregious and a strong one to make on a board of Brown students who feel that there is more value in their education than there every could be under what you stated as the only system that gets it right.</p>
<p>My fire may come from my youth, but I can read and I do know what you said, despite the fact that now you're trying to make it sound more innocent than it comes across. You came into a thread about Brown vs. Chicago and essentially dumped on any school without an extensive core as not providing you with the exact liberal arts education Brown seeks to provide its students and succeeds in providing its students. </p>
<p>My assumption you were a student came from the immaturity and short-sightedness of that remark that I consistently see amongst students on College Confidential, often students who attend Columbia or UChicago who are constantly justifying their education on here. So it was a Brown student's time to justify theirs.</p>
<p>The remark was uninformed. Had you simply written about what you felt a core could provide rather then making an unnecessary back hand remark about how it works here at Brown, I could have respected that. If you posed as a question, "Since I am not at Brown, I can't really say how these things are provided for there. Perhaps a Brown student can talk about whether or not their education is seeking to do blank and how it does that?" I would have respected you. But, since you came in here writing with the authority of an expert and the tact of a pundit, I felt the need to call you out on it.</p>
<p>If you think it's a cliche to use the phrases "trust" and "power" when talking about Brown's curriculum then I'm quite sure you're still not getting it. That's what it's all about, no cliche here. The New Curriculum was a student initiative that was passed by the Faculty Executive Committee after our students created and presented it in a 500+ page report. It was always about power in the students hand and the university placing trust and responsibility in our students. In fact, this general idea is what leads to our drug policy and a lot of the organization of this school and its culture. It's representative of the way administration and faculty feel about students here, etc.</p>
<p>To me, this sentence does not sound like exploration, it sounds like conclusion/dogma/assertion. You can be the judge:
*
If the true purpose of college is not partying, not being in urban or rural settings, it is not happiness, or vocational training, if it is not prestige, if it is training of the mind in being fully human and contemplative of itself, its humanness and the sensory world around, if it is perennial self-renewal and cultivation and not merely furnishing the mind with contents, then one needs to go to where the Great Books or texts or taught. To learn to understand the ancients and their relevance across 25 centuries. Thanks*</p>
<p>And this certainly sounds like you're implying that Brown does not provide students with what they need, and with a heavy hand...:
*
It is a complicated thread to explain but there is imagined to be a back and forth among these thinkers. *</p>
<p>Here is the assumption I'm completely unfamiliar with the core, and therefore, only taking offense to your statement because I don't know how great it is...
*
Distribution requirements, the other common liberal arts education, means someone can graduate not knowing Shakespeare or the Iliad. So, some believe students should not have a choice. You are welcome to disagree but in this hemisphere not to know western heritage would mean an ill educated person. Thanks.*</p>
<p>And here you suggest that students at Brown won't take these courses, that providing choice essentially equates to choosing not to do something.</p>
