The Ghost of Canons Past

If the General Education Task Force knew some history, they would know that the death of a tyrant is typically only the first step towards installing a new one. Caesar’s assassination only succeeded in placing Augustus on the throne. The execution of Louis XVI ended up allowing Napoleon Bonaparte to set up an empire. And now the euthanasia of the Core will only lead to the bondage of Harvard students in a new arbitrary system of General Education.

Of course, to the Task Force, these facts have little bearing since they are convinced that most history isn’t directly applicable to the present. They would never, it seems, hold the archaic belief that knowing the past prevents the repetition of mistakes. How quaint.

According to the finalized General Education Report, the proper theory of the purpose of liberal arts is the equivalent of making students better American citizens by reading the newspapers. The Task Force has given us a brand new idea of how liberal arts should be taught, the selection of which only shows us that apparently, all the good ideas are already taken.

Unfortunately though, history does matter. For example, the knowledge of a bit of history would show that the last time Harvard decided to reconsider its notion of a liberal arts education, it settled on the novel idea that liberal arts should teach “ways of learning.” This groundbreaking system envisioned that every student could be a mini-scientist, a mini-philosopher, and in the case of Literature and Arts C, a mini-starving artist. It was the Golden Age for education, and the Core Curriculum was welcomed in the streets as a liberator. Soon, order and happiness grew in the area as the oil flowed to the west from the democratic light of the Middle East…

When it failed, the Core Curriculum did so not because of students, professors, or the administration, but because of the weakness of its philosophy. The different ways of learning at first sounded quite appealing as a path out of lackluster academia, but like all academic fads ended up replacing orthodox restrictions with restrictions that were even more whimsical and limiting. Classes that didn’t state in their syllabus the goal of making a student a Science B-ian or a Moral Reasoning-itian couldn’t were cast out.

According to the Core program, only four courses in the English Department and one course in Scandinavian can provide the “variety of critical and analytical approaches to literature” needed to satisfy the Literature and Arts A requirement. Likewise, tutorials, some of the hardest classes at Harvard, don’t count because they lack a final exam. And because only pedagogical technique matters in Core-world, the material covered has become increasingly specific and trite.

Harvard needs to learn from history and avoid replacing one academic fad with another. The Task Force’s focus on “today’s issues” is just as arbitrary and transient as the “ways of learning” system developed and introduced in 1979. Nothing in the new General Education proposal convinces me that within thirty years another revamping won’t be needed. Instead the College needs to foster a return to liberal arts proper—a place where knowledge is not taught to develop abstract modes of inquiry or help one vote and balance a checkbook.

The true reward of a liberal arts education is the ability to view the universe through the lenses of different ideas. Only by understanding the influential ideas of the the past can we grasp why our current ideas exist. The system that best develops this knowledge is a liberal arts system based on great books or great ideas, like Columbia’s Core.

A paradigm of canons, of literary thought, of philosophical thought, and the same for art, music, and science holds the most value to students because it places our modern world in context. Twentieth century novels can only be understood as the refinement of a literary genre that reaches back to Latin novels. The conflict between intelligent design and evolution does not make sense without an understanding of how Darwin’s system is a radical departure from the Aristotelian notion in which each species is a form of perfection in itself. The government of the United States cannot be understood without English Common Law and Roman Law.

The world in which we live is not a unique piece of time where only current events and practical training matter. Instead, our time is a continuation of every time before us. The great ideas that percolate today are direct descendents of the great ideas of our collective past. Therefore, Harvard College needs a general education curriculum that revolves around this past instead of blindly embracing a new transient whim.



Steven T. Cupps ’09 is a biological anthropology and economics concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.