Word: commonalities
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Harvard undergraduates and prefrosh have more in common than they should. This past Visitas weekend meant the arrival of 1000 excited prospective students and, for many current members of the College, memories of their own similar experience a year or years ago. To prefrosh, Harvard can seem like a confusing place, and not just because of difficulties in navigating the campus...
...little deeper and you’ll find that Harvard hesitates to say explicitly that such a common bond unites us. Undergraduates’ latest institutionally-sanctioned educational philosophy comes from the Report of the Task Force on General Education. The task force’s framing of its new set of requirements fall well short of a claim to excellence. “The general education curriculum,” the authors admonish, “does not pretend to constitute a comprehensive guide to everything that an educated person should know. There is simply too much information...
...educated person should know. Officially, Harvard will not even broach the topic of whether specific information is necessary for education, let alone declare in what way excellence comes from academic study. In general, the language of this report centers on a rhetoric of preparation, not a rhetoric of common pursuit with one’s fellow students...
Academics, then, probably isn’t the common thread. Maybe there’s another unifying element to the Harvard experience. Yet the other list of possible candidates—athletics, extracurricular activities, and community involvement—are subject to even more division and are less likely to focus students around a common goal...
...collegiality present in these informal interactions could drive education at the College. However, to raise student collegiality to the level of the lecture hall would come precariously close to making academics not “whatever we choose it to be” and instead a matter of a common search for understanding—one that can’t be left at the exit of the classroom. This collaboration might then serve as an unofficial limiting of each student’s self-direction of study, and counteract the administration’s insistence on autonomous...