Word: kellers
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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...
...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 was a bit idiosyncratic. Others went further and called it ludicrous...
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...
...Keller deals at length, for example, with the familiar, perplexing question of why students may not substitute departmental courses for Core offerings. It would be patently absurd, of course, to imagine that in two years of Faculty deliberations that option never came to mind. Keller traces the conflict between "hard Core" and "soft Core" advocates, the former favoring and the latter advocating more flexibility. Basic to the discussions was the disputed definition of a "broad education"--should it stress knowledge of specific subject matter in several areas, or focus instead on introducing students to the different disciplines' "modes of inquiry...
Given Rosovsky's firm commitment to the "modes of inquiry" approach, it is clear from Keller's narrative that the flexibility advocates had little or no chance. Originally opposing the main sweep of the recommendations from within the Core task force, those who felt students should be able to choose substance, rather than method-oriented courses proposed a series of "limited bypass" and other amendments...