Fordham debates holding onto its robust Jesuit core curriculum. I’m glad my daughter is starting prior to any dilution of its current structure. Christopher Cullen names the problem I see everywhere — words for the good used all over the place without any sustained examination of their root traditions:
“Taking general education requirements in ‘justice’ (merely one of multiple options for seminars) without a prior systematic and deep foundation of reflection on the question of ‘what is the good?’ and on the normative ethical theories that follow from this reflection will contribute to the incoherent discussions of ethics that transpire in the public square today. To debate justice, one must first know what the good is. Students will be using terms without really knowing what they mean, a malady that Alasdair MacIntyre famously diagnosed a generation ago. It will be like people using terms such as ‘neutrino’ or ‘atomic weight’ without ever having taken basic science courses, or like students doing algebra without ever having taken arithmetic. There is an order to learning in the sciences and mathematics. So too there is an order to learning ethics. The new proposal cuts out the basic ethics course and thus will send students to debate ‘justice’ with little idea of what the term may mean or of the sophisticated and complex millennia-long debates that have transpired over this very topic.
Furthermore, in the name of freedom for students, the proposed smorgasbord of courses will in fact imprison them in the ignorance of their own culture and civilization, not knowing who they are, where they came from, to what civilization they belong, or of what stories they are a part. Such general education requirements, masquerading as a core curriculum, will produce ‘hollow men.’ Hollow for many reasons—hollow for not knowing where or when they are but hollow also because they will never have engaged in the first task of education: ‘to know thyself,’ to explore the inward caverns that are the human mind and heart.”
