I. Origins of the Western Tradition.
An integrated humanities
course with a Great Books focus. Students read Homer, Hesiod, the
dramatists, Aristophanes, Thucydides and Herodotus, the pre-Socratic
philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible and some ancient
Near-Eastern contextual material, Plutarch, Virgil, Horace, Ovid,
Lucretius, Greek and Latin lyric poetry, secondary material on Greek,
Hellenistic and Roman History, the Christian Scriptures, Augustine and
other early Church material. I am very sorely tempted simply to stop
there. That is easily enough material for two years; it is certainly
enough material for two terms, and this is only part of the curriculum.
I think it's important, moreover, to give a sense of this classical
material as living, as still being accessible, and if we race on from
here through Dante, Chaucer and Aquinas; Locke, Hobbes and Shakespeare;
Goethe, Cervantes and Milton; and on and on through Nietzsche and Joyce
and whatever else, then Plato and Euripides will only be cultural
signposts, matter to be learned for tests, rather than living presences
in students' lives...
II. English Poetry.
A
very traditional course. Beowulf, Chaucer, the Pearl Poet, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Whitman, Tennyson, Poe,
Longfellow, Hopkins, Yeats, Kipling, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Larkin,
Bishop. I've probably put in poets that some would consider dispensible
and left out others that some would consider indispensible; forgive me,
and consider this a sketch rather than a definitive list. This is
covering a lot of ground, and so necessarily the epic poets are not
going to get treated fairly. I'm not too upset about that, because if
students learn how to read well, they can return to Spenser either in
another course or even later in life; if they don't learn to read well,
then they will not be able to....
III. Aspects of American Civilization.
Not
a history course. It presumes a decent familiarity with American
history; I imagine a strong basic American history text assigned as a
reference and to help students who weren't paying attention in high
school to keep up. This is, rather, an open-ended exploration of the
nature of American Civilization with both a historical and a
comparative method. So, for example, one key "aspect" of American
Civilization that would be explored is the nature of American
Constitutionalism. To that end, students would familiarize themselves
with the British antecedents to the American system, read the
Federalist Papers and some of the anti-Federalist arguments, read some
key Supreme Court decisions, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and finally
some of the best contemporary analyses of the American Constitutional
tradition (examples: Democracy and Distrust, The People Themselves, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction; pick your favorites). Other topics would include immigration and the origins of the American people (start with Albion's Seed and move on from there); the American foreign-policy tradition (I'm imagining working within Walter Russell Mead's framework); slavery, anti-slavery and the problem of race (David Brion Davis, Eugene Genovese, etc.); the American experience of religion; one can go on and on...
IV. Principles of Aesthetics.
Secondary
schools around the country have been cutting back on art and music;
meanwhile, the tribunes of high culture from the major art museums to
schools of architecture are failing utterly to teach humanistic
aesthetic principles; and popular culture is almost comically debased.
We are surrounded by ugliness, to the point where most people do not
even know how to think about the aesthetic. The course will spend a
little time reading about theories of the aesthetic (Aristotle, Ruskin,
Pater, Nietzsche) but will mostly approach the topic directly, by
interacting with works of painting, sculpture, architecture,
photography and music. A strong emphasis will be placed on solving aesthetic problems:
how to achieve such and such effect in a way that works....
V. Probability and Statistics.
No
branch of mathematics is more important to thinking intelligently about
the world than statistics...
VI. Concepts in Economics.
Ignorance of
economics is nearly comparable to ignorance of statistics. But people
need to understand some economics for reasons ranging from their own
personal prosperity (understanding the importance of savings and
investment, and the function of different forms of debt like mortgages
and credit cards, as well as intelligently capitalizing on one's own
skills and talents) to participating intelligently in political life....
VII. Logic and Rhetoric.
...Formal logic as such is an esoteric discipline, but basic logical
principles need to be drilled into students, as do different rhetorical
strategies, and then they need to use these principles and strategies
in real situations....
VIII. Problems in Philosophy.
...I
titled the course, "Problems in Philosophy" because I think that's the
best way to approach philosophy for true novices: present problems that
philosophers have wrestled with. The emphasis is intended to be on
"purer" areas of philosophy: how we can know something, how we can
communicate meaningfully, etc., and to avoid aesthetic, moral and
political questions that might be dealt with adequately in other
classes in the core.
IX. Introduction to Human Biology.
A
course in human biology would be valuable for many reasons. First, for
reasons of health; people really should know about how their bodies
work and how to keep them working. They should also understand their
own development; both men and women should have a realistic
understanding of fertility, of child development, and of aging, because
they will be planning to start or delay starting families, raising
children, and taking care of aging parents. Our increasing
understanding of human biology also informs all kinds of moral and
policy questions that students are engaged with....
X. Colloquium on Ethics, Morals and Values.
Unfortunately,
this course will inevitably be a gut course, one you almost can't
possibly fail. But I think it's appropriate for there to be a course in
the core explicitly devoted to exploring questions of ethics, morals
and values; questions of how one should live one's life and what is the
good. Students will have learned a great deal about the Western
Tradition's classical approaches to these problems in the Origins
course; they will have learned something about what modern knowledge
brings to bear on these questions from the Economics and Human Biology
courses; they will have learned something about how to intelligently
phrase and answer questions from Logic and Rhetoric. They should have
the tools, in other words, to ask and try to answer what are,
ultimately, the most important questions....
