Why a Core?

Liberating the Core from the Culture Wars D iscussions abou t whe ther schools should encourage or even require students to comple te a core cur r icu lum dur ing their first two years of college typically founde r on the shoals of intractable normative debates abou t what ough t to be in the core. Ever since the seventeenth-century "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns ," scholars have waged inkwell wars over the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual worth of various domains of learning. Some advocate for m o d e r n writers over ancient; some champion Hebra ism over Hellenism; some favor the humani t ies over the natural sciences. Today, discussions of core curr icula instantly descend into the familiar a rguments tor and against a canon of great books, multiculturalism, and Western civilization. These battles over the intrinsic worth of various domains of knowledge are inherent ly in terminable and not directly relevant to the quest ion of what belongs to the core of a college curr iculum. The word "curr iculum" refers to a circular racecourse: a scholastic cur r icu lum leads a s tudent a round the circle of knowledge. What we must first consider is not what should be long to the core of knowledge bu t what does be long to it, and this, as we shall see, can be d e t e r m i n e d mainly on objective grounds. O f course, deciding what belongs to the core of the college curr icu lum leaves open many o ther impor tan t curricular quest ions abou t the s tructure of major and minor subjects, language and foreign culture requirements , and electives. I will argue that the core of a college cur r icu lum ough t to focus on the relatively settled core of h u m a n knowledge rather than on the rapidly-changing controversies at the frontiers of inquiry. The core of h u m a n knowledge is that body of concepts , facts, and texts p resupposed by all advanced study in the various disciplines. That essential core of knowledge can be identif ied largely wi thout recourse to normat ive controversies abou t the worth of differen t fields of study, as I will a t tempt to show. We need to in t roduce our s tudents to the actual core of h u m a n knowing so that one day they might be in a position to assess and to make cont r ibut ions to the frontiers of knowledge.