Reply to Gen-ed requirements: part of a well-rounded liberal arts education or high school 2.0?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Coming out of high school, I mostly looked at colleges with strong general education programs. I wanted a well rounded education at a higher level, not just courses in my major, and I wanted to surround myself with people who wanted the same thing.

I ended up at Chicago where my experience was definitely not high school 2.0. It was focused and disciplined, and it contributed a lot to the way that college formed who I am. I've got a college friend I see once a week, and we end up mentioning someone we read as part of the core pretty often.

A well implemented program can offer a lot, but a lot of places don't have that.

[/quote] How would somewhere like Brown have prevented you from getting that same well rounded education?[/quote]

It may well be possible to piece it together somewhere like Brown. Looking at the course catalog (briefly, obviously) it seems difficult though. As an illustration: like many U of C undergrads, the first thing I read was the Iliad. It looks like there are two classes at Brown this year that mention Homer in their descriptions: one is a topical class on islands, the other is a class on epics that goes through Milton.

On one level, then, I could read the same books. I don't think I'd get the same kind of education, though. The context in which you read a particular text matters, and the contexts are very different. I read the Iliad as part of my humanities core sequence and I read it again in a class on epics like the one from Brown. The humanities sequence I took expressed the goals of the course as "to discover what it means to be an excellent human being and an excellent citizen, and to learn what a just community is." We read Homer alongside Aristotle, Genesis, and Moby Dick, rather than other epics.

The two times I read the Iliad (in college, I still return to it fairly often now) were different courses with different goals, and the way in which we read it the first time has shaped me more than the way in which I read it the second time. The aims of my first year course were general, more aimed at establishing a foundation, than with diving into a specialty. You could offer a course with those kinds of goals at Brown, but the existence of the core is a commitment to making sure that they're in the catalog along with a history of offering them so that an incoming student knows that they're there. You can still take the sequence I took today with mostly the same texts. It has a track record.

There's also the element, for both the humanities sequence I mentioned and for the social science sequences (hum and soc in U of C parlance), that the target audience is first and second year students. There's an element, not of high school 2.0, but rather college 101. A chance to introduce what it means to read closely and think deeply and take those thoughts to a group for discussion. I'm sure a lot of you think you or your kids don't need that, but having watched excellent students from outstanding high schools go through the process (not me, I was from a bog standard public high school in a rural area, but I had classmates from top high schools), I disagree. That experience was invaluable.

There's also what the inclusion of a strong core curriculum means for the culture of the school. Here the best example is not Homer, but Marx. It's basically impossible to pick core sequences that don't include reading Marx, and you'd find a red copy of the Marx-Engels Reader on basically every bookshelf of anyone in my graduating class. That common base of reading leads to a particular kind of experience both in and out of the classroom while you're there.[/quote]

I mean, I read the Iliad and Moby Dick in high school AP English and both Marx and Engels in high school AP Gov.  You didn't read these until you reached college?  That speaks volumes.  Whatever it is you're babbling on and on about isn't exactly making your point.[/quote]

And yet, they sound like a more interesting, thoughtful and mature person than you do.[/quote]

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