Agriculture and the Undergraduate (1992) / Chapter Skim
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7 The Inherent Value of the College Core Curriculum
7 The Inherent Value of the College Core Curriculum
Pages 60-67
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From page 60... ...
St. Augustine once said that the only reason to study philosophy was "In order to be happy." A twentieth century philosopher, Charles Frankel, explained the joy that the humanities can bring by noting that peoples experiences are enriched if they know the background of what is happening to them, "if they can place what they are doing in a deeper and broader context, if they have the metaphors and symbols that can give experience a shape." Frankel himself used a metaphor to make the point: "Think of what the lore and legend, the analyses and arguments, that surround baseball contribute to our enjoyment of the game.
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From page 61... ...
It is not just in the humanities that college seniors are found wanting. The National Science Foundation recently sent a film crew to a Harvard University graduation and interviewed the bright, freshfaced students who were about to receive their bachelors degrees.
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From page 62... ...
At one public university in the west' it is possible to fulfill humanities requirements with courses in interior design. In 19881989, at a private university in the East, one could fulfill social science distribution requirements by taking lifetime fitness.
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From page 63... ...
It has been covered in the popular press as well as in the academic press. Critics argue that no matter how good the courses in what Harvard calls its core curriculum are and no matter how fine the faculty members who teach these courses are, taken together they do not provide the connected learning discussed by Cardinal Newman.
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From page 64... ...
The mental skills they attempt to develop usually involve such things as how to identify the sequential order of events or how to follow directions involving substeps. The basal readers try to teach these things by constructing a plastic, artificial prose, not real stories.
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From page 65... ...
How can it be unmasked? At the University of Minnesota, the Humanities Department recently proposed abolishing its chronologically ordered Western civilization sequences and substituting three new courses: the first is called Discourse and Society; the second is called Text and Context; and the third is called Knowledge, Persuasion, and Power (university of Minnesota, 1989)
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From page 66... ...
, told of teachers across the United States trying to engage their students with the dynamic and moving events occurring in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Czechoslovakia and of those teachers finding their students confused and indifferent. The students simply did not have a sufficient historical context to understand the significance of the changes.
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From page 67... ...
U.S. students left flat by sweep of history; Teenagers find East European events confusing or irrelevant.
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