Word: core
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Contrast these departmental intro courses to Core courses (true, Ec 10 and A-12 are also Cores) and youll find more than one significant difference. For one, Cores are much more focused. They purport to teach modes of thought rather than provide a broad background in the topic itself. The aforementioned History 10a, a broad introduction to Western history, counts for the same Core credit as a class on the Cuban Revolution. Additionally, many of these Cores treat non-Western subject matters. These two differences seem to pose a bit of an internal contradiction. More likely than not, your department...
...College and its departments are taking their first faltering steps towards reconciling these priorities at odds. Using the apt words of Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier 60, whereas Harvard students long ago labored under a General Education curriculum designed to instill values, and now under a Core Curriculum aimed at teaching methods, the future of distributive requirements at Harvard will fall somewhere in between. Maier, writing in Essays on General Education in Harvard College, himself touts connectivity as this Golden Meana reaction to the gradual deprivileging of Western values by the new, connected global community in which...
...this impending compromise between methods and values, the outlines of which have already begun to take shape, it is crucially important that we remember why we study the West. While Maier believes that Western values should no longer be privileged in the way they were during Harvards pre-Core, Gen Ed days, he also adds that, from one perspective, Western values should be deprivileged because of their worldwide diffusion. From this point of view, studying the West is really about understanding the basis of a global culture that many feel is emerging. The West won, and so a firm grounding...
...models for the ever-elusive Harvard College Courses on which Harvards new distributive requirements will be modeled. In an internally circulated report last semester, the Committee on General Education recommended that these Harvard College Courses be content based. Not only does this mean that they will not be like Core classes, it also means that theyll be disasters if their boundaries arent well defined. Imagine a course on global culture. Opponents of Western civ courses already criticize the fact that they cover too much material too fast. These are the same people who rant that these courses unfairly privilege Western...
...appropriate way means recognizing the central role that Western thought plays right now, in whatever way one chooses to acknowledge it, and then seeking to discover the origins of that thought. Harvards World War II-era Gen Ed curriculum put Western thought on a pedestal. And the Core tried its best to make Western thought non-essential to graduation (even as most departments ensured their students would be firmly grounded in it). Going forward, the Committee on General Education must simply accord the West the same treatment it gives other subjects. Dont privilege it, but dont neglect it either...