A Bad Idea

After four years and innumerable committees we finally have a fundamentally new general education curriculum. Such finality should be welcomed, but however glad we may be that the Preliminary Report of the Task Force on General Education has been released, it is, in its current form, a thoroughly bad idea.

The Core Curriculum, the Task Force’s thinking goes, focuses too strongly on “ways of knowing” and too little on actual knowledge. So far so good; there is undoubtedly a certain breadth and depth of knowledge that every graduate ought to have.

But rather than take the next logical step and allow students to take more specific “knowledge-based” departmental classes instead of vague Core classes, the committee has opted for the opposite tack. The report sets out eight areas of general education with even vaguer titles than our current Core divisions, apparently favoring interdisciplinary superficiality over depth and coherence.

The stress on connecting “what students learn at Harvard to life beyond Harvard” and the nebulous concept of “global citizenship” blend together to create a set of meaninglessly broad curricular areas. Furthermore, in noting that few Harvard undergraduates intend to pursue academic careers, the report argues that the Core’s “emphasis on the disciplines may be misplaced.” But Harvard is, for better or for worse, a liberal arts college and not a technical or pre-professional school. The suggestion that we should avoid the heart of a liberal arts education merely because most students do not intend to remain in the academic world is ludicrous. Liberal arts education cannot simply be concerned with what is practical; if we begin going down that path, why not go the whole way and compose a Core Curriculum of accounting, carpentry, and “Empowering You”?

The reduced emphasis on history and literature in favor of two courses in “Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change” and “The United States: Historical and Global Perspectives” is the most egregious sin of the new curriculum. At a time when pre-professionalism and strict functionalism are omnipresent, instruction in areas where an immediate real world link cannot always be found must be preserved and enhanced. History, literature, and the arts must be taught for their own sake, not because they make us “global citizens” or prepare us for Wall Street.

In many cases, the new system simply embraces already popular, even faddish subjects and elevates them into requirements. “Reason and Faith”-type courses for example, should certainly be an option in whatever comes to replace the Moral Reasoning requirement. But to require it as a field in its own right simply because religious conflict abroad and religiosity at home are on the rise makes general education more beholden to the news ticker than the essential components of knowledge.

By deciding that classes like Science B-57, “Dinosaurs,” Literature and Arts B-48, “Chinese Imaginary Space,” and English 151, “The 19th Century Novel” aren’t sufficiently relevant to be included in the general education curriculum, the committee runs the risk of trivializing a host of departments and a number of highly distinguished academics. Though it may be that the scope of some courses makes them better suited to the new Core, the committee seems to be specifically accusing these courses of teaching material that is not worth knowing.

While purporting to shift the focus away from the disciplines, the committee ends up, semi-randomly, just privileging some disciplines over others. Issuing this kind of broad, institutional judgment against certain classes and disciplines will not only leave many students bereft of excellent classes, but will also discourage them from enrolling in departments whose classes are not deemed “21st century,” “global,” or “relevant.”

One might even wonder whether the committee has chosen to pursue positive press coverage and change merely for its own sake. When last year’s now-defunct proposal for a system of distribution requirements was released, Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan’s response was that “It’s not going to put Harvard on the front page of The New York Times.” Possibly not. But maybe this is an issue where the best course of action isn’t to make waves in the national press but to adopt ideas that have already worked. Working within the current Core structure, slightly revising the categories, and drastically increasing the number of departmental courses that count seems like a good starting place.

So in the end, embarrassing as it might be to begin again, this curriculum sorely needs to be shifted away from its heavy emphasis on the contemporary and practical to provide a broader, more fulfilling set of divisions. Now, if we just added a few more literature and arts courses, changed back “United States: Historical and Global Perspectives” and “Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change” to “Historical Studies,” and renamed “The Ethical Life” to something a little less preachy sounding, say, “Moral Reasoning…”—Oh wait…

Alex N. Chase-Levenson ’08 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House.