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A Core Curriculum for Tomorrow’s Citizens
By Harry Lewis, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2007
In a September 2007 opinion article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard professor Harry Lewis revisits the oft-asked question, “Should college students be required to take a core curriculum?” Lewis, the author of Excellence Without A Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?, comes down strongly on the “yes” side of the debate. Despite trends in higher education to view students as “consumers” and provide an ever-increasing variety of choice, Lewis argues that colleges and universities’ main purpose must remain producing “an enlightened, self-reliant citizenry, pluralistic and diverse but united by democratic values.”
Lewis discusses some of the common arguments against core curriculums: that college is too expensive to dictate what students should study—they should study what they want; that students are too diverse to be able to benefit from a common curriculum; that experts in dissimilar fields can’t be expected to agree on what students must know. But all these arguments are less important than one overriding truth, Lewis writes: “…nothing holds America together except our intellectual legacy of democratic principles. If universities don’t honor that legacy, our children will not inherit our nationhood genetically. They can receive it only through learning.”
So what should a core curriculum include? The core principles of our country, Lewis argues: the ideas of liberty and equality under the law, the idea of citizen responsibility for the country’s good. College is “more than a set of assessable skills and measurable outcomes.” A twenty-first century core curriculum can “renew higher education’s moral compact with America.”
The entire opinion piece is available from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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