Hard and Right

In the underrated 2005 film, “The Weather Man,” Michael Caine provides invaluable advice to his son, Nicholas Cage, who is suffering from an existential crisis. In his characteristic British accent, Caine says: “Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. ‘Easy’ doesn’t enter into grown-up life.” At this stage, no wiser words could be applied to the Harvard College Curricular Review.

For the last four years, we have been searching for a guiding philosophy to succeed the Core. We’ve been looking for a liberal arts identity to fit the 21st century. The Preliminary Report of the Task Force on General Education suggested as much when it proposed, “a new rationale for general education at Harvard, one that is distinct from the rationale for the present Core Curriculum.” For the most part, the Task Force likes what it has but needs a more convincing justification for the status quo.

Perhaps we need something more revolutionary, though at Harvard a dramatic change seems unlikely. One of the initial approaches of the Committee on General Education favored freedom, suggesting that it would suffice if students took three classes in each of the educational arenas (Science and Technology, the Study of Society, and Arts and Humanities). The proposal currently on the table centers instead on connecting our books with the tools our generation will need to face its challenges. Both these ideas are justifiably in fervent opposition to vocational training. But I have one qualm: The committee on General Education tends to veer towards anarchy instead of rigor.

Yet rigor is precisely what we need. Although freedom is always a popular idea, it is not the best suited in our case. And however brilliant, our latest proposal—the Task Force’s Preliminary Report—might not be either. Both of them—just like the current Core—fail to see that as students, we come here to learn. Any desire for instruction is an acknowledgment of ignorance. We are thus not ready to make decisions about what a “liberal arts” education means. The ability to make an informed choice is perverted into searching the CUE Guide for the most acceptable ratio between course difficulty and workload.

Though it may sound unpopular, what we need is less freedom: We need a system like Columbia’s. The Columbia Core is a rigid requirement of ten arenas, concentrating portal courses in Literature Humanities, Contemporary Civilization, Frontiers of Science, Art Humanities, and even Physical Education. The rationale is obvious: There is a body of knowledge that each student must know before he or she can be fit to be called a graduate of Columbia. There are no exceptions or excuses.

It is not freedom that is important, but enlightened freedom. The current Core proposal proclaims that such enlightenment will only be reached when we update the tools to face modern challenges. Yet the human condition has changed little since Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. We are still passionate about love, troubled by death, and profoundly confused as to how to run our societies.

The main qualm people have with this approach is that it is difficult; someone has to choose which books to read, and selecting some means leaving out others. There are always going to be difficulties in making such choices, but this does not invalidate the need for us to make them. It’s like not having Thanksgiving because turkey is difficult to cook.

Another reason to have compulsory foundational courses is because some courses are, well, foundational to advanced understanding in a discipline. This is particularly true in the sciences. Only with the key concepts developed in broad, introductory life sciences classes are we able to fully understand advanced topics in quantum mechanics and genetics.

As our “red book” of 1945 was born from the ashes of the Second World War, Columbia’s Core was born amidst the optimism of the “Wilsonian moment” after World War I, when educators were conscious of the need to accommodate themselves quickly to a profoundly changed world. As conflicts reshape our world yet again, it is time we realize that Michael Caine is right. The decision to make our liberal arts core more rigorous is a difficult but correct one.

Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Eliot House.