<p>"I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic notes, students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at all.""</p>
<p>Interesting.</p>
<p>I don't understand why Harvard gets picked on because of its liberal core requirements... in fact a very large number of major universities have no core either, just a set of distribution requirements. So what's your point?
You think all schools SHOULD have a rigid core curriculum like Chicago or Columbia?</p>
<p>when I was at Yale, Peter Beinart (a yalie himself) was dating the dean of my college (a harvard graduate). It was always odd to stumble into saturday or sunday brunch at the dining hall and seeing him there, snuggling with the dean. the sight was enough to give me a hangover, which I usually had anyway.</p>
<p>I agree with h<em>&</em>b. Yale's "distributional requirements" are very light indeed. Harvard's core requirements are a little idiosyncratic, but BFD. At least the core instructors are generally enthusiastic about the material they're presenting.</p>
<p>I believe that all schools should have an actual core like Chicago & Columbia. Or something like DS (Yale) or SLE (Stanford) for freshmen.</p>
<p>Im sorry but a core is useless.</p>
<p>I dont care about calculus, I will never use calculus in my life, calculus violated my sister...therefore i do not think that i should be required to take calculus when I could spend that time taking classes that i actually enjoy.</p>
<p>And you might come out having learned nothing.</p>
<p>The decline of the core curriculum conincides with massive decreases in the average American's vocabulary, decreased voter turnout, a declining publishing industry, various distance-from-voters problems for public officials, and so on.</p>
<p>Those are grave threats to America's political culture. A liberal arts education would prevent that.</p>
<p>Anyone feel like robbing the New York times of that article for us hapless Pleibian non-Times Select subscribers?</p>
<p>You're lucky. It's one of the most pointless articles I've ever read. I can't believe I wasted the time.</p>
<p>After the first paragraph quoted by the OP, the article continues: "But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great education, no matter what college you attend." </p>
<p>It then offers a prescription for creating your own core (thereby, I suppose, preventing the decline of Western civilization). The prescription: read Niebuhr and Plato's Gorgias, take a course on ancient Greece, learn a foreign language, spend a year abroad, take a course in neuroscience and a course in statistics, and forget about your career.</p>
<p>I'm serious - that's it. Oy.</p>
<p>Hm. That certainly diminishes my curiosity.</p>
<p>"The decline of the core curriculum conincides with massive decreases in the average American's vocabulary, decreased voter turnout, a declining publishing industry, various distance-from-voters problems for public officials, and so on." </p>
<p>Are you kidding? Like the decline of the core curriculum at Harvard and similar elite institutions would ever affect these national trends! A student at an elite college already has a far, far wider vocabulary than the national average (and the sample size is far too small to make a difference nationally). The sample size is far too small, again, to affect voter turn out in the slightest (and I suspect that the vast majority of these grads vote anyway). The elite grads in the publishing industry are mostly lit majors, it's not like a science major would go into publishing based on a course he was forced to take against his will (in almost all cases). These 'huge social problems' are not caused in the slightest by the decline in the core curriculum and any correlation is completely random.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The prescription: read Niebuhr and Plato's Gorgias,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Funny, this is what my Harvard freshman is reading (well, he has not gotten to Niebuhr yet, but he's on the list) as part of the disparaged Core curriculum requirements. As for other suggested elements, he's already fulfilled (and overfulfilled) some of them. I do expect him to get more out of his Harvard education than the limp list cited above. Oy, indeed.</p>
<p>And you might come out having learned nothing.</p>
<hr>
<p>No, I would just come out no learning calculus...which I dont mind.</p>
<p>The decline of the core curriculum conincides with massive decreases in the average American's vocabulary, decreased voter turnout, a declining publishing industry, various distance-from-voters problems for public officials, and so on.</p>
<hr>
<p>absolutely no evidence that the diminish of the core has any relation to the decrease in voter turn out nor a change in political affairs.</p>
<p>Marite, I love it. And my Harvard freshman (at the other end of the concentration spectrum from yours) is currently taking a neuroscience course as part of the disparaged Core curriculum requirements. Maybe there is still hope for Harvard graduates. :)</p>
<p>I'm a fan of a core curriculum, but I thought the column and its arguments were just plain silly. If the last hero students could learn from lived in ancient Greece, civilization is in even more trouble than I thought! </p>
<p>I'd support an argument that said: a core curriculum is valuable because it provides students a shared intellectual experience, requires them to grapple with big ideas and abstract thought whatever they will major in, shows them how great thinkers have grappled with those same big ideas over thousands of years, and teaches how to analyze and argue. Obviously, a core curriculum is not the only way to accomplish these goals. But to pick out three or four texts or subjects and say "if you read this you're an educated person, if you don't then you're not" is ridiculous.</p>
<p>And, why neuroscience as opposed to genetics or cosmology?</p>
<p>
[quote]
The decline of the core curriculum conincides with massive decreases in the average American's vocabulary, decreased voter turnout, a declining publishing industry, various distance-from-voters problems for public officials, and so on.</p>
<p>Those are grave threats to America's political culture. A liberal arts education would prevent that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Because chronological overlap implies causality, right?</p>
<p>What did they say about Yale's core curriculum? Oh right...</p>
<p>I'm getting pretty sick of all of this trolling.</p>
<p>"Marite, I love it. And my Harvard freshman (at the other end of the concentration spectrum from yours) is currently taking a neuroscience course as part of the disparaged Core curriculum requirements. Maybe there is still hope for Harvard graduates."</p>
<p>Hahahaha. I think I'm in your son/daugher's class. BS 80 rocks my world. (I'm glad I'm concentrating in Literature . . . )</p>
<p>The core is honestly not that big of a deal -- not worth all of this discussion, anyway. Yes: there are academic areas that you must explore against your will while you're here. Yes: it may seem tedious. Yes: there are set "Core" classes for you to choose from.</p>
<p>But, there are also non-Core classes that fulfill core requirements. My neuroscience class, for example, is not really a "Core" class, it's a required class for Mind, Brain, Behavior (MBB) concentrators that happens to fulfill a core requirement; in other words, taking it is like taking an elective. You can do that in any core area--it's pretty open, and in that sense, I don't see how it's any worse or different than Yale's system, and both schools are certainly less constrictive than Columbia (which is a matter of preference). </p>
<p>Core-bashing is so last year. Give it up for Lent, would you?</p>