College should prioritize core values over superficial diversity in their curricula.

Reviving the Core Curriculum: A Matter of Student Health

Last week, interim President Richard Corcoran of New College of Florida, where I am a trustee, released an executive summary of a new core curriculum at the school. It’s a proposal in an early stage, but the first principle of a solid core is stated explicitly numerous times.

The summary doesn’t lay out particular courses that will make up the New College core, as reform began only a few months ago. But “Whatever the choices made,” Corcoran writes, “the program should be uniform.” Every student will pass through it, and everyone will read a set list of works (Plato, The Federalist Papers, and Tao Te Ching are mentioned). The sequence may run to a dozen courses divided into the two categories of “Techné” (science, technology, engineering, and math) and “Virtue” (humanities), not just the one or two Great Books courses that many schools including Harvard allow a few interested kids to choose.

This “central, common, intellectual experience” will “create a community,” Corcoran predicts, and not just within each respective cohort that passes through. Alterations from year to year will be rare.

• Progressivist educators insist that as the world changes the curriculum must change. They love innovation and the cutting edge. That desire won’t fly in Sarasota.
• “The Virtue curriculum will be stable over time. Alumni children would read the same books which their parents read 25 years ago. The curriculum binds the NCF family across the generations,” Corcoran writes.

This fundamental commitment to sameness, commonness, and stability stands in forthright opposition to the customary blather about diversity, cultural relevance, social change, student choice, and other frameworks of “progress.”

Throwing out the Old

Let’s understand this as a matter of student health. First among the many educational crimes done to young Americans of the past two generations is the withholding of a coherent and elevated sense of the past. It started back in the previous century, when notions of diversity and multiculturalism broke up the old syllabus of Western civilization — English literature from Geoffrey Chaucer to James Joyce, the Enlightenment breakthrough, the Great American Novel, and other big-picture models — treating those noble lineages as exclusionary and unrepresentative.

Such inspiring traditions ended in a blaze of curricular reforms that downgraded dead-white-male stuff and emphasized select thinking skills (no more required U.S. history, for example, just any course that instilled “historical thinking” in some fashion). Educators cast the turn as overdue progress, an escape from the blinkered certitudes of Eurocentric agents.

They didn’t put anything in its place though — certainly not a rival big picture. Instead we have in the humanities a general education offering a little of this and a little of that, a Chinese menu of courses collected under abstractions such as Harvard’s “Aesthetics & Culture,” “Ethics & Civics,” “Histories, Societies, Individuals,” and “Science & Technology in Society.”

• Each section contains multiple choices that students can take that semester to meet the requirement. Under the first topic, we have “American Dreams Made in Hollywood and Beyond,” “Anime as Global Popular Culture,” “Black Radicalism,” “LGBT Literature, Politics, and Identity,” and many more narrow and unrelated courses.
• No common material, no common experience, nothing that every student is supposed to study, or that is affirmed as so essential to an educated person that it cannot be avoided.

The broad message is clear: The past is a jumble. Students in Cambridge and a thousand other places draw the obvious conclusion that the centuries that preceded them have no purposive meaning, no momentum.

No Shared, Eternal Truths

To be educated in this way is to grow old in a wavering, superficial habitat. Religious observance might fix it, but most millennials and Generation Z-ers don’t attend services. No transcendent orientation for them, no eternal beings or truths. They live in the present alone, here and now, isolated in their own experience. The formation, scattered and casual, reinforces their solitude.

The meaning of their lives shrinks to the grooves of achievement and self-gratification. No wonder 71 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds believe most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance.”

A fixed, coherent, superior core is one way to supply them with what has been lost. We need it not just at New College, but at every liberal arts school in America.

Mark Bauerlein is emeritus professor at Emory University and an editor at First Things magazine.