Word: kellers
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...wish to take issue with Amy E. Schwartz for the statement in her review of Phyllis Keller's Getting at the Core: Curriculum Reform at Harvard (October 30, 1982) concerning "Monuments of Japan" (Literature and Arts B-23). Ms. Schwartz suggests that this course, offered for the first time last fall, is a "strange compilation" and implies that it is a source for the typical frustrations of the undergraduate when dealing with the Core...
...alternative distribution formula, specifying a mix of introductory and advanced courses in two of three broad areas, on the grounds that some students might already have a degree of expertise that the Core could not satisfy. Though the formula "appeared to provide just one more degree of curricular flexibility." Keller says, "Rosovsky and his followers were quick to perceive that if the faculty supported a more distribution requirement, no matter how restrictive, then the Core was doomed before it started...
...KELLER'S DETAILED ACCOUNTS of such controversies not only illuminate what Rosovsky had in mind, they also make crushingly clear how inevitable it was that the Core take on its present form, with no mitigating factors, once the dean had determined his philosophy of, as Keller puts it, making students "dilettantes in the best sense." The price of sacrificing all possible alternatives to remain true to a curricular concept has definite cautionary overtones, especially if one compares the blithe generalities of the dean's vision with the face-less, focus-less classes that crowd the Core today...
...doubt like those who debated and developed the Core. Keller avoids making a direct judgment as to which approach--learning the methods and aims of a subject, or learning the subject--has more educational value. And that question forms the basis for the typical undergraduate's frustration at not being able to take Ec- 10-type survey courses or legitimate in-depth courses in all areas, instead of strange compilations of "conflicts of cultures" or "monuments of Japan...
...more or less randomly into the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities". And had they paid closer attention to the difference between intention and execution in Gen Ed, they might have foreseen that the Core's constraints would only keep students from exploring even that far. As it is, Keller's account is as frustrating as it is enlightening. It's depressing for a Core critic to think that even if he had been there to argue, he couldn't have stopped the tide...