L'Esprit de Core

The author of last week's Opinion column pronounced harsh judgment on the Core curriculum. Far from introducing breadth and intellectual cohesion into the education of undergraduates, he charges, the Core "has betrayed liberal arts education, transforming it into technical training." In his opinion the faculty has neglected its responsibility to say what knowledge "is fundamentally important for an educated American." Instead, it has left decisions "to the students--in their selection of courses--and to the specialized scholars..who design and teach Core courses."

In its brief but contentious history, the Core has come under attacks from two quarters: those who condemn it as an authoritarian imposition on students, and those who condemn it for failing to tell students what is important and what is not. When the Core was under construction, the pages of this newspaper were given over primarily to the first criticism. But since then the wheel of academic fashion has turned its inexorable turn. And given the notable willingness of Harvard students to take Core courses even when they don't have to, it is difficult to see them as slaves bending to the will of faculty tyranny.

The Core that emerged from several years of intense discussion was in part the product of give-and-take and political bargaining: it had to be if it was to win the approval of so strong-minded (and several-minded) a body as the Harvard faculty. But it was something more as well: a distillation of what this faculty generation believes to be the most meaningful way of broadly educating students in what they take to be fundamentally important in the arts and sciences.

Are they right? Maybe. Have they legislated for the ages? Of course not. Last week's critic disagrees with their solution to the general education problem, and so he finds the Core curriculum to be "no curriculum at all." Had the faculty been serious and honest, it would have turned to something like the 1945 Harvard Redbook version of general education which "unabashedly" defined the core of necessary knowledge as the "intellectual, political, and cultural heritage of the West." In those halcyon days, students in courses on "Great Texts in Literature" and "Western Thought and Institutions" were baptised en masse through total immersion in the great books and ideas "which have structured Western civilization."

The trouble is that in our time the Redbook's emphasis on transmitting the Western cultural heritage, while appealing to many faculty, strikes many others as intellectual parochialism. Certainly the Cure makes room for the teaching of those books and those ideas--and many of its courses do just than. But even the Redbook had another emphasis as well: on what in cultivating "certain aptitudes...traits and characteristics of mind." During the decades since the Second World War, that goal has come to be expressed, in much of the arts and sciences, through the development of distinctive disciplinary modes of thought. It is in this realm that many of out faculty think their thoughts and live their lives. If the Core did not try to make this powerful and pervasive from of intellection the keystone of its structure, it would have been meritricious indeed. For ultimately, any from of effective general education must rely not on what others think is important but on what those who are doing the teaching think is important.

Nor should it be forgotten what the faculty was reacting to what the Core emerged in 1977 to 1978. General Education by then was composed not of a handful of broadly gauged inquiries into the very best that had been thought and writers but was a heterogeneous grab-bag of unrelated courses. In its place the Core-makers tried to create a program that (1) fostered the intellectual breadth of all Harvard students: (2) took account of the disciplinary revolution in academic life and did not sinfuly invade the time traditionally set aside for concentrations and electives.

What you are in what they did. By most meanings--student evaluation and enrollment, readiness of the faculty to teach courses in the Cure and to think up new ones for it-it seems to be alive and well. It's true that the Core curriculum does not attempt to say that some subjects or bodies of knowledge are more important than others. But it does say that certain basic skills and distinctive says of thinking are essential tools for acquiring the ability to learn, understand, and enjoy through one's life. In their own way, the Core courses introduce students to important intellectual questions and ways of answering them. Hardly "technical training!" Mental faculties, not mental furniture, are what the Core is designed to produce.

It should go without saying (though apparently it does not) that one cannot learn to think in the abstract: one has to think about something. But here we come to what is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the new curriculum. Critics point an accusing finger at courses such as "Monuments of Asia." "The Novel in East India," and "The Great Rebellion: Britain 1640-1660" as instances of narrowness run attack. They conclude from this that the Core makes students "slaves of the techniques of narrow academic study": worse, captives of "powerful departmental interests."

Doesn't it seem odd that the faculty would go to the trouble of creating a Core curriculum if all it wanted to do was pass off departmental courses as general education? Surely it could have simply required that students sample a fixed number of departmental offerings outside of their fields of concentration. But the faculty rejected this alternative precisely became a majority believed that Core courses should have pedagogical aims different from those of departmental courses.

True, some of the Core course siting do not look different. But, for example, numerous courses in social science departments do not meet the Core guidelines for Social Analysis. Those that do are expected to begin with a question of major intellectual significance, present alternative answers, and weigh evidence that tests those answers in a systematic manner. The subject matter of Social Analysis may vary enormously. The treatment--a treatment governed by agreed-upon guidelines--does not. The courses within each Core area share a common pedagogical aim. That is what is new and distinctive about the program.

Finally, last week's author wants the Core to give students "the spirit for intellectual inquiry into their human condition." A noble goal, but, as manipulators of the soul have--or should have--discovered over the centuries, the spirit of inquiry emerges from within, it is not imposed from without. The faculty provides guidance, hopefully in the very best way it can. What students make of it is up to them.

Phyllis Keller is Associate Dean for Academic Planning and the recent author of Getting at the Core.