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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
 AWASH IN HERODOTUS “Students should not come to view their classes as an amalgam of subjects but rather as a concerted, unified inquiry,” writes the proprietor of the blog Slightly Critical. He’s a GWU undergrad, and he wrote this on his blog and in the university’s student newspaper. “Education is a comprehensive enterprise where previous knowledge is expanded upon; it is neither a random sampling of courses nor an amassing of trivia. … [T]he long-term interests of students must trump the short-term interests of faculty.” Gradually more and more serious students are picking up on the patronizing language of people like a dean at requirements-free Brown, who assures us that “the difference between courses where students are forced to be there and where students have chosen to be there is like night and day.” Only an American would describe a shared set of courses at a college as an instance of “force.” It would be an interesting mental experiment for people at Brown to expand the concept of "choice" to include the volitional selection of a rigorous undergraduate institution, coherent curriculum and all. Brown’s rapid descent in the college rankings lately suggests word’s getting out that while taking what Jay Matthews, in a piece today in the Washington Post, calls a “smorgasbord of courses that don't really have much to do with each other” will make you happy - Brown ranks very high in student happiness - it will not make you educated. Spinning like mad, and keeping the primary purpose of a college education - nay, life itself - front and center, the Brown administrator insists to the rather anxious student reporter (alumni and trustees too, he acknowledges, are beginning to question the ranking) that he's not concerned: "Armstrong said happiness at Brown is a direct result of the University's curriculum and liberal attitude toward learning. 'When you give students the freedom to set their own academic program,' they become more engaged and thus happier, he said." In his article, subtitled “Modern Campuses Return to Works of Dead White Males", Matthews notes a trend toward true core curricula in American colleges, a response to people having recognized that, as one administrator puts it, the curriculum was becoming “too much like a shopping mall, and there was a deeper and more fundamental concern over the very nature of what education should be for undergraduates." “Several colleges seem to have common freshman course requirements but in reality don't,” Matthews explains. He quotes an administrator: "Many of these courses seem to be seminars, small classes with term papers, the subject of which varied with the interests of the instructors, who were drawn from different departments."
"When it is Herodotus week," says a dean at Reed, "the campus is awash in copies of Herodotus. This creates an intellectual basis for freshmen to interact." ---------------------------------------------------- UPDATE: And as long as we're on the subject, Allan Bloom said it best almost twenty years ago: The third island of the university is the almost submerged old Atlantis, the humanities. In it there is no semblance of order, no serious account of what should and should not belong, or of what its disciplines are trying to accomplish or how. It is somehow the repair of man or of humanity, the place to go to find ourselves now that everyone else has given up. But where to look in this heap or jumble? It is difficult enough for those who already know what to look for to get any satisfaction here. For students it requires a powerful instinct and a lot of luck. The analogies tumble uncontrollably from my pen. The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found castaway treasures that made them rich. Or they are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling, either unemployed or performing menial tasks. |