Word: knowledgeã
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...Core curriculum was created in 1979 with the best of intentions and the loftiest of goals. Proponents of the system saw it as a way to ensure that Harvard graduates were not only educated in a particular subject but also familiar with “the major approaches to knowledge?? in several key areas, to quote the official Core website. The philosophy of the Core Curriculum, the website’s mission statement explains, is that if students are familiarized with different ways of critical thinking about cultural, social, historical, and scientific problems instead of told to master...
University President Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, introduced his former boss, praising his leadership skills and depth of knowledge??as well as his ability to draw a crowd...
...Core Curriculum, at the center of the liberal education we receive at the College, was never designed to cover a specific list of texts or to convey a set body of facts. Instead, it was designed to teach “approaches to knowledge?? that would allow students to understand the methods of inquiry employed by the different disciplines and to apply these methods themselves once they have left the University’s gates...
...acceptable courses in order to graduate. Core courses are frequently far larger than their departmental counterparts, with all the impersonal bureaucracy that large classes bring. Smaller, more intensive or higher-level departmental courses would be equally effective (if not more so) at communicating “approaches to knowledge??—yet they are often marked off-limits to undergraduates with limited space in their schedules for electives...
This shortcoming does Harvard’s undergraduates a grave disservice. When students are welcomed into the “company of educated men and women” at Commencement, does it mean that they have achieved an understanding of the various “approaches to knowledge??—or at least enough understanding to receive passing grades in the Core? Or are there any works or ideas with which “educated men and women” can be expected to be familiar? We believe that there are indeed certain texts and contexts that...