Word: core
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
While fabulists generate national attention because of schadenfreude (and in turn, help Crimson reporters get their names in the national press), perhaps breaking stories that merit national stature, including about the presidential search or reforms to the Core would be a better use of resources...
...temptation to which Harvard has repeatedly succumbed and indeed, this is exactly the mistake the new Core makes. Instead of seeing intelligent students as individuals who are best off formulating their own ideas and questions, it treats them as vessels to be stuffed with a certain body of knowledge before they leave. The Core is terrified of the genius of, say, the black girl from a predominantly black community who comes here to study race, concentrates in African-American Studies, and only participates in black student groups. According to the curriculum today, this is unacceptable; do please dilly dally...
Emerson would have been thrilled to find a mind so conscious and passionate of its purpose. He would have hated the Core because it compromises genius while compensating mediocrity. Emerson had even made the very unorthodox argument that vocational training could count as a liberal arts education, simply because “education should be as broad...
...only would the pragmatists have thought the Core unnecessary, but they would have noticed that it did not actually work, even by its own terms. When Eliot implemented his elective system, one of the arguments he made was a pragmatic one, that it was foolish to push the student “into studies for which he has no capacity and in which he feels no interest.” Were Eliot still alive today, he might have said, ditto the professors...