Wudel, D., Weber, R., & Lee, J. S. (2006). Reforming liberal education and the core after the twentieth century: Selected papers from the eight annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, Montreal, Canada, April 4-7, 2002. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
This selection of papers from the eighth annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses offers selected brief papers grouped under five headings: Building Programs, Assessment, Core Texts (Old, New, nontraditional), Science & Humanities, and Problems and Possibilities of a Liberal Education. A common theme is the centrality of “core text programs” to liberal education.
Describing a four-semester “Collegiate Seminar” at St. Mary’s College of California, Hamaker & Sweeney emphasize faculty engagement, institutional support, mentoring for new faculty, seminar-style classes and seminar-related activities as elements making the seminar a campus wide “core culture of shared inquiry” (p.3). Buerk & Harper stress collaboration and shared discourse among eight faculty members from diverse disciplines in developing common readings and assignments for a Global Civilization seminar. Ann Kirkland relates her experience in developing a weeklong summer “vacation” and weekend reading program “Pursuing the Classics” for adults – an interesting idea to apply to students and/or faculty. A refreshing contribution is Joy Castro’s description opening a Core course “Cultures and Traditions” to staff at Wabash College and its positive effects on the campus community. Groake & Smith recount the challenges of starting “Core Program Campus” in the small city of Brantford, Ontario. Their explanation of the slow initial enrolment has broad applicability to liberal education (Brantford later combined the Core program with “Companion” majors and minors that were more attractive to students, but the “core program” does not appear to be included on the university website).
The prospective students we wished to attract (and their parents) …. Had little interest in core texts or broader intellectual reflection, and identified … with a culture that was instead defined by popular music, television sitcoms, the World Wide Web, and other forms of mainstream culture …. Most of the students and parents we hoped to reach did not appreciate the value of liberal arts education and were instead preoccupied with a desire for career-oriented programs (p. 33).
Because “liberal education” and “science education” are frequently treated as two different (often competing) endeavors, I was particularly interested in the section “the Sciences and Humanities Together”.
George Lucas’s “Reading Descartes’s Meditations through the lens of mathematics” is a long (although often amusing) essay, but worth persevering. In contrast to the other essays in this book it does not focus at all on Core texts or Core courses, and yet to my mind it is the most relevant and penetrating among them.
As well as offering some excellent insights on students and teaching, he addresses the arbitrary separation of disciplines and their “possession” of texts through the example of Rene Descartes. Descartes was both a mathematician and a philosopher, but math texts typically ignore his philosophy and philosophy texts treat his contributions to mathematics as a “historical sidebar”. Lucas relates how teaching Descartes in a philosopher class while also teaching mathematics made “a subtle but profound difference” in the way he viewed and interpreted Meditations; “the things that we think we understand [and present to our students] take on a different shading when read against the backdrop of Descartes as a mathematician” (p.130). He observes that what philosophy professors “possess that their students do not [is a] received, sanctioned, disciplinary “take” or widely shared perspective” (p.133) that promotes such separation and impedes interpretations from different perspectives. Lucas gives the wonderful example that contrary to mainstream interpretation, Descartes was not hopelessly mired in the famous “mind-body problem” but gives a lucid explanation: “I am not merely present ‘in’ my body a sailor is present in a ship … I am very closely joined as it were intermingled with it” (p. 134). He speaks of “disciplinary glaucoma … in which there is a loss of horizon or perspective, a narrowing of the intellectual vision” versus a perspective unrestricted by “disciplinary lenses” that sees “a larger, comprehensive project as viewed from a horizon or perspective that is not initially subdivided” (p. 135). With regard to Descartes, Lucas bemoans that “his works now belong to two distinct groups or disciplines whose members rarely communicate with one another” (p. 136). His approach is to illustrate to students the mathematical approach that underlies much of Descartes’s philosophy, so that “each step … in Descartes’s essay increasingly comes to look to them exactly like what they would expect a mathematician, who is developing a reliable model of the world, to do” (p. 143). The final part of the essay offers interpretations of Meditations from a mathematical perspective, along with echoes of Descartes warning that there are some questions (such as God’s purpose) that are beyond the scope of reason.
Anne Leavitt gives a much briefer illustration of a work that scorns the separation of disciplines, Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland: a Romance of the Many Dimensions, which “both playfully and seriously reveals that in the multi-dimensional world of lived human experience such neat divisions are abstractions, capable of revealing some things but also of burying others below our visual and cognitive horizons” (p. 150).
The essay that stands out in the final section is David Neidorf’s “(Mis)using the Odyssey as “Course Materials”: How to Subvert Liberal Education by Mistake, which takes the discussion beyond “choosing core texts” to “using core texts”. Neidorf notes that “there are lots of ways to use core texts … that have nothing to do with liberal education” (p. 178). One of these is using texts to support or illustrate one’s own argument. He concludes that subverting “great books” as “course materials” prevents them being read with the “excitement and attention” they deserve (p. 179).
Questions
- What do you think about a modified (free, non-exam based) Core or “Great Books” course for faculty and/or staff?
- How applicable does Groake & Smith’s explanation of low student enrollment in a Core Program seem to your discipline/institution/core program?
- Are there issues in designing a Core Curriculum specifically for a Catholic University that are not addressed here?
- In his essay on Descartes, Lucas refers to limited Horizons, the importance of applying a method to other disciplines. Are there other ways that this example (and Core curricula in general) address Lonergan’s “specialization” as a challenge to higher education?