Word: forceã
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...meaningful change” unless the final General Education report includes more stringent guidelines about which courses will count under the new requirements, three undergraduate focus groups concluded yesterday. In a letter sent to the Task Force on General Education, the students expressed broad support for the task force??s philosophy of general education as preparation for life after Harvard. In contrast, the current core emphasizes exposure to different academic approaches to knowledge. But the students expressed concern that the proposed categories could become little more than a renamed core. Without concrete guidelines, “many professors...
...This is highly unfortunate. Religious illiteracy is the norm at our largely secular campus, making it almost impossible for Harvard to converse with a religious world. Furthermore, forgoing the reason and faith requirement will perhaps irretrievably confirm the pragmatic, utilitarian ethos of the task force??s vision for Harvard education, banishing rigorous thought about meaning, purpose, and life’s ultimate questions to an academic never-never land...
...while the original report did well to address the issue of religious literacy, it unfortunately did so in a spirit of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism. The Task Force??s underlying rationale for general education can be summed up in three words: real-world citizenship. Perhaps reflecting the pragmatic worldview of the task force co-chair and Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language Louis Menand, they have taken the focus off of academics and directed it instead towards real-life application and civic duty...
...Unfortunately, the task force seems to have forgotten that education is about more than just amassing useful facts. While facts will help students be successful and participate in democracy, a truly liberal education ought to address deeper questions. In that sense, the task force??s real-world citizenship rationale only goes so far. It does not provoke us to think deeply about why we ought to be good citizens, parents, lawyers, artists, or, for that matter, anything...
...questions that lie buried at the heart of a university, giving direction and purpose to the human quest for knowledge. The original report nodded in this direction by noting that many Harvard students are religious, and often struggle to sort out what they believe. The task force??s latest idea—a vaguely-stated “what it means to be a human being” requirement—seems to be reaching towards this realization, but it looks to have been tacked on as an afterthought, not fully understood even by its proponents...