What should be taught, and why?
by Don Kazak
The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience; by W.B. Carnochan; Stanford University Press; 174pp; $24.95
What does and doesn't get taught in our colleges and universities every once in a while captures the larger public's attention. Stanford's great internal debate several years ago over changing its Western Culture required offerings wasn't a subject of lofty, calm discourse within stately academic portals.
It was the stuff of chanting, of students protests and fiery debates, recriminating editorials in the Wall Street Journal and news stories on the front page of the New York Times.
Stanford and other brands of liberal, humanistic thinking were condemned by such noted academics as Allan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind") and Dinesh D'Souza with his book "Illiberal Education."
Hand in hand with a backlash of conservative thinking has come the new popularity of bashing "political correctness" on campus.
In the middle of all this, the president of Stanford University, Gerhard Casper, stands up last year and says maybe we don't need a full four years for some undergraduate degrees.
To a casual observer looking on from the distance, all this may seem nothing less than a latter day battle for the hearts and minds of the young people and, in time, for the future of the Republic itself. Of course, that's the way it always has been, in one way or another.
But while many things catch the headlines--more courses on Chinese-American history at Stanford, for instance--few realize that there has been a redefinition of what has come to be called the liberal education in American universities.
Unfortunately, not even the practitioners of the curricula in American universities have a good sense of how things have developed in the way they have, with specific decisions made at different points in history.
Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford English professor, has tried to pull those historical threads together to show how they have always been part of the same fabric, albeit one dyed different colors or cut into different shapes along the way. For as long as there have been faculty members, Carnochan could almost say, there have been these debates about curriculum.
Carnochan's "Battlefield of the Curriculum" is aimed more at the academics than the general public, but it is also central to anyone who wants to get a concise account of how the winds of curriculum changes have blown across our best campuses in the last 100 years or so, the legacy we are left with, and some important questions that lie ahead.
As Carnochan describes, a place like Stanford today has its roots in long ago and far away debates.
The university as a model for modern science research came from Germany a century ago. The idea of a liberal, humanistic (non-secular) curriculum and manner of thought comes from Oxford in England even a century earlier, although it was itself the subject of fierce debate.
Giants of American education, notably Charles William Eliot (president of Harvard, 1869-09) and others offered the final piece to what would be the 20th century formula for American universities by introducing the "free elective system." That would replace the system of dictated course offerings.
With the elective system in place, there were always backlashes, from the so-called "Great Books" curriculum to the various forms of Western Civilization courses that dominated the key offerings at many places like Stanford, in one way or another, for much of this century. Hence the national outcry when Stanford ditched its Western Culture requirement, and the ensuing criticism of the Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza books.
For Carnochan, as the curriculum debates continue, "American universities have attended closely to whatever has made them what they are and therefore has influenced what they can become."
Carnochan's conclusions are sobering but also hopeful:
"Lacking adequate criteria of purpose, we do not know how well our higher education works in practice or even exactly what working well would mean. We could do better on both counts. The universities need not only to understand their own history better and how that history intersects with the larger history of the nation but also (once more) to understand what they have been trying individually and collectively to do--and then, as good sense may suggest, take steps needed to bring ends and means in closer alignment."
When Stanford President Casper announced the formation of a commission on undergraduate education last year, he wanted less to debate which degrees may be earned in three years or four, but instead to ask a far more basic question: What are we doing here? "We often don't have a clear end in view," he said. "What are the critical and necessary elements of an undergraduate education?"
Stanford's Commission on Undergraduate Education, the first such exhaustive study here in 25 years, may had wide-reaching effects across academia, complete with critical responses and outright anger, depending on the details of the recommendations due to be public later this year.
Angry responses forthcoming or not, Casper is asking the right questions.
And one of his own faculty, Carnochan, has set down the historical thesis in preparation for that latter debate.
Another version of what we are doing here, by Carnochan: "Yet the big question is not the abstract ideal of liberal education and its derivative strategies but the specific purpose of whatever it is, educationally, that we are trying to do? What is any requirement, or set of requirements, actually for?"
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