tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post5421659205820084684..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: Defining the university curriculumDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-81719081777572587902009-12-03T11:54:36.216-05:002009-12-03T11:54:36.216-05:00Gary,
Thanks for these thoughtful comments. You ...Gary,<br /><br />Thanks for these thoughtful comments. You raise very important issues, and there's plenty of room for debate about both ideas: can we really create a "general" education that works; and can we create a university environment that helps students mature ethically and as citizens?<br /><br />Here are a few thoughts about the general education question. There are colleges like St Johns (Annapolis and Santa Fe) that jettison the concept of a major altogether and create an education centered on careful study of great texts. Other institutions like Colgate University have a "core" curriculum of general education courses that are required of every student and serve as a sort of intellectual foundation for their specialized majors. The core might include 5 courses (20 credit hours), so it represents a meaningful fraction of the 32 course graduation requirement. It is then the task of the faculty who jointly determine the content of these courses to do a good job of identifying learning goals and designing a syllabus that achieves these goals. The weakest approach is the standard distribution requirement: 2 courses in math, 2 courses in natural science, 2 courses in humanities, ... The weakness of this approach, as you imply, is that it is a smorgasbord that may not really do much of a job in exposing the undergraduate to the best ways of thinking associated with an area of study. I've sometimes dreamed of an undergraduate curriculum that did not involve a major, but instead involved in-depth exposure (5-6 courses) in a range of disciplines. These graduates would lack specialized knowledge but would be strongly prepared in quantitative skills, reasoning, acquaintance with history, ...<br /><br />On the ethics question: this also is tricky. I don't think anyone would support the idea that a university ought to "teach" a specific set of ethical doctrines. But it is a reasonable goal, I think, to hope that the university succeeds in helping students come to think more reflectively and more meaningfully about the ethical and social choices they are faced with and will confront as citizens and professionals.Dan Littlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-28875188596799971762009-11-28T15:50:23.589-05:002009-11-28T15:50:23.589-05:00Dan, thanks for this post. The set of values that...Dan, thanks for this post. The set of values that you articulate -- "breadth, imagination, historical and social context, rigorous reasoning, and a genuine ability to live and work in a multicultural world" -- is an excellent list, and I agree that most great universities, indeed most good universities, have placed their bets on some such vision of liberal learning. It is less clear to me that this set is in fact strongly realized in university curricula, or that in practice the values add up to a whole equal to or greater than the sum of the parts. (Perhaps they don't have to; a dispersed curriculum might be fine.) <br /><br />How to develop a good, truly liberating <i>general</i> education, as opposed to concentration or major, seems a nut that few institutions have fully cracked. Pragmatic justification of liberal learning is fine, but sometimes I'd like to see a little more <i>pragma</i> and a little less justification. In highlighting justification in terms of career benefits you do not, of course, exclude the benefits of liberal education for citizenship and personal life, but I do wonder if there might be a couple of other candidate values for your list more directly pertinent to the latter -- political and moral valuation. It’s an age-old question whether virtue can/should be taught; there are real questions about value-neutral vs. advocacy-oriented approaches to education; and political and moral reflection might already be embedded interstitially, as it were, in your list. But I think these could be questions well worth considering.Gary Knoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-40946572937047027622009-11-24T06:57:29.938-05:002009-11-24T06:57:29.938-05:00I like Nussbaum's invocation of the Western cl...I like Nussbaum's invocation of the Western classics (Cicero, Socrates, etc...). <br /><br />One slight amendment I would like to make is that every culture in the world has classicals texts and traditions and these need to be added to the western curriculum too. <br /><br />Often these classics get buried under political problems like they have in Burma and Thailand. Because they have been mobilized as symbols in nationalistic politics they become charged often with quite negative meanings. <br /><br />Recovering classical traditions from mere fodder for nationalism is an important albeit neglected task.Jon Fernquesthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14974424595128404537noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-46266254887491332222009-11-24T00:55:56.514-05:002009-11-24T00:55:56.514-05:00I'd like to call for empirical research. I ha...I'd like to call for empirical research. I have my own theories, but I can't be sure.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-36686542795454384272009-11-21T11:52:16.518-05:002009-11-21T11:52:16.518-05:00You know..I would normally accept the following st...You know..I would normally accept the following statements as fact: <br /><br />--<br />The reasons offered for this answer to the question are pragmatic ones. A leader or creator - in whatever career - needs to have an understanding of the social and historical context of the problems he or she confronts. He/she needs to have a rich imagination as he confronts unprecedented challenges - within a startup company, a non-profit organization, or a state legislature. He/she needs to have the ability and confidence needed to arrive at original approaches to a problem.<br />--<br /><br />But I'd like a little more rigour. I'd like to know why that statement is true. <br /><br />In ancient times, most leaders did not have the benefit of social and historical context to their decision making. Were they lesser leaders?<br /><br />Just a thought.Domnoreply@blogger.com