Word: core
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Alex, is an ordinary teen whose fascination with skateboarding supersedes all other issues in his young life: casual sex, his broken family or certainly school. The legendary hangout is East Side Park, known to the hard core skateboarders as Paranoid Park. One night he lends his board to a stranger who in exchange offers to show him how to ride a freight train. It was a surprise to me that young people today even knew there were trains, let alone freight trains, let alone an outlaw tradition of riding the rails. Maybe Alex has some hobo blood...
...meetings have ended, the smoke is white, and Harvard College has a brand new curriculum. The infamous Core Curriculum, a relic of the last Bok administration, has finally been sent to its demise and in its place will stand a new general education system...
Alas, the new system in fact remains diffuse and diluted. With every academic faction in the College insisting that no student should graduate without taking their course, the resulting proposal was uninspiring, with the catchall categories of the Core dressed up in lofty rhetoric. What ought to have been an incisive, practical new plan devolved into another exercise in esoterica. In the end, general education is a case study in the frustrating nature of Harvard politics, characterized by institutional inertia and politically correct banality...
...There’s going to need to be a new cadre of classes,” Nowski said. If professors only “change a line or two of their syllabus,” then students will only end up with “a Core by another name,” she said...
Indeed, perhaps the Harvard of fifty years ago provides a healthier academic and social model for us to follow. A substantive core curriculum ensured undergraduates learned math and read Shakespeare and Plato. Hyper-competitive students moderated themselves through a custom that shunned egoistic ambition. Grade inflation hardly existed, for earning a “Gentleman’s ‘C’” was no mark of shame—indeed, everyone already understood that a Harvard degree meant something...