Word: eds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most of its history, after all, the General Education program resembled the Core program in its current form quite closely. In 1949, when Gen Ed became a regular part of education at Harvard, students were required to take three lower level Gen Ed courses. The distribution requirement had to be filled by taking middle group or departmental courses. The 1949 system was essentially the same as the Core Curriculum that is now being debated: students were permitted a limited choice of courses in a few prescribed areas, except that in 1949 there were three areas while the current proposal calls...
...more general education students tended to demand courses more relevant to particular contemporary problems. In a way, it was easier for the Faculty to satisfy these demands than those put forward by the 1964 Committee on Educational Policy. The Faculty was able to introduce an abundance of new Gen Ed courses dealing with the American political power structure and energy development without changing the overall structure or the philosophy of undergraduate education. And when the political commitment of the students began to weaken, Gen Ed courses became more specialized, often dealing with obscure topics like Inner Asian history, or else...
Liberal education seems to yield easily to the pressures of social forces. In the first ten years of the Gen Ed program, all students, including science majors, were required to take natural science courses taught from a historical perspective. The requirement originated in the praiseworthy idea that scientists should be introduced to the social implications of science and the moral issues it involves. But two years after Sputnik frightened America into expanding its science education program, the Faculty stopped using the historical method in its Gen Ed sciences courses and allowed science students to bypass Gen Ed science courses altogether...
...years after Gen Ed began, the Faculty modified the program slightly by permitting science concentrators to substitute departmental courses for their Nat Sci requirement. In the late '60s, after incessant Faculty debate, the requirements remained the same although the number of Gen Ed courses increased dramatically. The decisive break with the original system only came in 1971 when the Faculty set up the current system of departmentalized bypasses, and allowed the more specialized middle group courses to count the same as lower group courses. The Core proposal, therefore, is not a step 40 years into the past, but only...
...ardent belief in the values of liberal education, they underlined the contradiction between the goals of the General Education program and the specialized departments, arguing in a report that the "college should be fundamentally interdisciplinary in its approach to education". The committee proposed a possible concentration in Gen Ed which would be designed by each student individually, and suggested the creation of interdisciplinary seminars and tutorials. Yet the Faculty never accepted the students' proposals...