<p>My concern isn't really about specific classes. It's just that-- it seemed to me, looking through the course descriptions of a few departments of areas of interest to me-- there were an awful lot of classes that dealt with very specific areas of their fields, even at the introductory level, and would therefore be of relatively limited use to students with less experience in that field. It appears to me-- though I sincerely hope I'm wrong-- that Harvard's idea of "general education" is manifest in having students take specialized classes in disparate areas, rather than generalized classes in all areas and specialized classes in one or two. Is that impression correct?
I guess what I'm getting at is that Harvard's curriculum is not necessarily conducive to creating "big picture," generally educated students, who have a solid understanding of the sweep of intellectul history. It seems rather conducive to creating brilliant analysts and careful specialists. In my 200-level poetry class at Sewanee, for example (I'm a high school student, but taking college classes) almost everyone except me has read Dante, including a Chemistry major, just because Sewanee strongly recommends that all students interested in majoring or minoring in English take the class on Dante and Homer towards the beginning of their studies. Though Harvard must in most ways be a much better school than Sewanee, the fact that it does not always require of its students that kind of basic grounding in intellectual history seems potentially a major failing.</p>