Shots In The Dark: The Core Is Dead

Wednesday, May 16, 2024

The Core Is Dead

Harvard's faculty voted on and passed a new curriculum yesterday, thus demonstrating that the faculty is not wholly ungovernable and counterproductive. So how come nobody sounds very excited about it?

English prof Jim Engell calls it "an imperfect document." Harry Lewis says that "we have simply missed the opportunity to do the right thing." Bill Kirby, always good for a China joke, said, "“The motion was passed unanimously although many comrades were opposed.”

I haven't thought as much about this as the people involved, but it still seems to me that there's no intellectual theory to this reform other than saying, well, people should take courses in a few important areas, and also it'd be swell if they connected to the real world.

The first strikes me as obvious, the second mundane. Is this really all we can expect from the world's finest university?

¶ 8:16 AM

Comments:

Haven't read the story yet but will say now that I am COMPLETELY FED UP with this discourse of 'university world' versus 'real world.'

People are at a University to LEARN. Some of them are not yet members of adult society; others are coming from there with a specific goal in mind. But NONE OF THIS makes school in any sense FAKE.

'University' vs. 'real world.'
The binary is a reactionary's playground, an impregnable benighted fortress for anti-intellectualism, and correlates highly on every known axis of measurement with dumbassery.

Use of the dichotomy both results from and causes an extremely lazy manner of thinking about teaching and learning (not to mention research in an empiricist tradition), and I am disgusted by the Crimson's use of that formulation in the headline. I pray it's not a dichotomy the faculty has just endorsed.

Fuming Eagle

# posted by Standing Eagle : May 16, 2024 3:09 PM

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