Word: cores
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Keller is entirely aboveboard about her firm commitment to the Core experiment, her next paragraph numbers President Bok, Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky, and Core task force chairman James Q. Wilson among those who criticized and reviewed the book in manuscript. For the reader truly skeptical of the Core's philosophy, her account is likely to be more historically than philosophically interesting, more rationale than investigative debate...
...APPENDIX" to Phyllis Keller's book on the Core Curriculum evokes a laugh--a laugh born of the shock of recognition. Sure enough, there in the unmistakable typeface and format of the Course Catalogue is "a partial listing of Core courses" (last year's). The Big Book's vapid generalizations and inimitable manner of description are here preserved for all posterity, from "Literature and Arts A-11--Theater and Drama" to "Foreign Cultures 32--Political Doctrines and Society." Bound into the volume with them is the account--as seen by Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty for academic planning...
Keller's faintly anomalous position as an observer of and participant in the Core's genesis--which she presents as a case study in academic reform, with implications of interest for American education in general--is characterized by a passage in the book's acknowledgements. After describing her involvement in the reform process through committee membership and "countless meetings," she notes that the book is "not in any sense an official or 'authorized' account of what happened. I have tried to make this record of the Core controversies as full and objective as possible and to give a fair...
...that the rationale isn't fascinating as such. For of all curricular reform movements launched or proposed over the years, whether at Harvard or in the wider scope of beleagured American school systems. Harvard's Core vision is perhaps the one whose logical and philosophical underpinnings are the least obvious to observers. Though the national press did, as Keller notes, focus massive attention on the event as an educational revolution, academics across the country still express confusion as to what exactly the fuss was about Many thought the proposed array of 90 courses as a "core" of basic knowledge...
GETTING AT THE CORE clearly has value in mapping out the preconceptions and priorities under which the innovators operated. And Keller's explanation of how various dissenting opinions were either dispensed with or incorporated fully satisfies the curiosity. Whether or not one agrees with the policy that emerged. Keller makes it clear how it happened...