By Rick Branscomb
English Department

Rick Branscomb

The central idea of a core curriculum is that there are certain skills and bodies of knowledge that every single graduate of a college or university must know. If you can’t do _______ or don’t know _________, so the reasoning goes, you can’t be credentialed as a college graduate. And since it is difficult to set up a curriculum such as that on the first try, colleges tend to tinker, to revise. Nationwide, many of the proposed revisions to the core, including the many ones here at Salem, are based on the same set of outmoded assumptions: the value of the tried and true, the need for what in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s came to be known as “cultural literacy,” and the sense that somehow we have to return to a golden age of Western civilization. And finally, especially today, there is the disquieting sense that students as consumers will choose to study and learn what they please, and all our expertise will be for naught. The metaphor is most commonly a smorgasbord or salad bar–take only the stuff you like (cheeseburgers and ice cream) and leave the stuff we know you need (liver, fruits and vegetables). Harry Lewis, writing in the September 7, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education, explains this argument thus: “In any case, the argument goes, given what families pay for college, they should be treated like customers. Like patrons of a restaurant, students should be able to choose what learning they want. We don’t care if they eat nothing but cheeseburgers.”

But arguments for revising the core curriculum are historically situated and context specific. What worked for Matthew Arnold in 19th century England or for Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago in the 1930s or John Dewey in the first half of the preceding century will not work in the early years of the 21st century. For a 21st-century Core, we cannot look to the past. For one good reason: The Internet. My father in law, a wise man with a constant twinkle in his eye, used to speak ironically of waiting for the time when “this Internet thing would blow over.” As he well knew, and as we all need to recognize, it is not going to blow over.

Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat is a long, detailed look at how this revolution in communication–and it truly is a revolution, a quantum leap, a paradigm shift–will affect the world. The flat world, Friedman writes, is a world enabled by instant communication in which it is “possible for more people than ever to to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.” (8) It is impossible to overestimate the effects of instant, worldwide, democratic communications. Yes, I know there are exceptions: Much of the world lives in a kind of poverty that we cannot begin to imagine and has no hope of ever seeing a computer or a fiber-optic line in their lifetimes; China and other non-democratic regimes routinely censor and block Internet transmissions; terrorists and religious zealots threaten to drag us or bomb us back to the stone age.

But at Salem State College in 2010, we have to come to grips with the effects of the Internet. The effects are not all beneficial, and we as educators have to acknowledge them in our curriculum and teaching. If we continue to hold on to Arnoldian beliefs about high culture and the best that has been thought and written and the abstract life of the mind and other appeals to intellectual elitism, we are doing our students incalculable harm. We are producing citizens for a world that does not exist—a world of limited, knowable, and manageable ideas; a world in which truth and untruth can be easily ascertained; a world in which rational discussion can solve many if not most problems. Maybe that world never existed—it probably did not—but regardless it is a prelapsarian world to which we can never return.

So what are the characteristics of this new age engendered by global communications and radically participatory democracy?

First, a kind of abundance of everything. We simply have too much–too much stuff, too many words, too many images. We are overwhelmed. Daniel Pink, in this clip based on his book A Whole New Mind, points out that in the Great Depression and its aftermath, the concept of, say, self-storage units made no sense. People did not have enough; overabundance was not the problem.

And how does this translate to the realm of education? Marshall McLuhan, in his speech before the Vision 65 conference, said, “The youngster today…goes to school and enters a world where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules…this 19th century world of classified information that still characterizes the educational establishment.” Those of us old enough to remember libraries with card catalogs remember research: days and days spent in the library with huge indexes with maybe three possible sources to show for our week’s effort. Today? Ten million hits in Google in .0832 seconds, organized not logically but by popularity. We simply have to provide ways for our students to deal with abundance.

Second, a morass of information, misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies in the spheres of communications and interpersonal relationships. Citizen journalism allows for investigations uncovering the seamy side of business and government that the national media might miss or bury under the rug, but it also allows for the instant worldwide transmission of irresponsible untruths without the bother of fact-checking. Think “Swiftboating.” How are our graduates to navigate this undifferentiated mass of, for lack of a better word, information? Is our current curriculum designed to ensure that our graduates can do this?

Third, a siloing of groups and individuals. Christine Rosen has called this “egocasting” and Cass Sunstein, in his recent writings on the subject, calls it “group polarization.” The early proponents of the Internet (I was one) were licking our chops in anticipation of a new world of democracy, many-to-many communication, collaborative knowledge-making, a voice for everyone. What we got, while it embodied some of those principles, turned out to be a way for citizens to cherry-pick bits and scraps of knowledge (to use the term loosely) to support their own preconceptions. Don’t like having an African-American President? Find someone like you who claims President Obama was not born in the United States and trumpet that. It is easy to ignore everyone else and all contrary facts.

What role can education play in helping our graduates deal with this new world?

A core curriculum that will prepare graduates to function in this new world will be based upon logic (not necessarily Aristotelian logic, though that is a good place to begin, nor syllogistic nor Toulmin logic); upon composition (in its original, etymological sense); and upon, yes, statistics.

Logic. I’m tempted to say “thinking” here, and that may be what I’m getting at. It’s not exactly a Cartesian rationality, not syllogisms nor warrants nor major premises. It has something to do with epistemology, something to do with the nature of evidence, something to do with abstracting and generalizing. But ultimately I have in mind something to counteract the effects of what I think is the most profound logical flaw being practiced in America today: reasoning from insufficient evidence. Too many people, when asked why they believe in this or that, respond with an isolated example that supposedly proves their case. Read the “That’s Outrageous” feature in every Reader’s Digest to see what I mean. If I hear the phrase “That’s the microcosm of the macrocosm” once more, I may scream. Ultimately, it may come down to…

Statistics. I am hesitant to tell my colleagues in the Math Department how to do their jobs, but I really think, given the overabundance of information we have to deal with every day, a sound understanding of probability and statistics is crucial. In a talk at TED (the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference) last year, Harvey Mudd mathematician Arthur Benjamin explains why:

Statistics is, according to Benjamin, “the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data.” What could be more important for negotiating meaning and truths in the Internet age?

Finally, Composition. But composition in a new sense (actually, the old sense of its etymological roots: a “putting together,” in Latin). I speak as a compositionist here, one trained in rhetoric and writing. But my definition of “composition” has evolved greatly in the nearly forty years I have been teaching it. It has become increasingly apparent to me that composition can no longer be seen as print-only. The age of the printing press is over, and composition has to be seen as more than marks on paper. Photographers compose, painters compose, musicians compose. The way people compose their thoughts and make their points today includes a number of elements of the audio and visual. And composition as it is taught–must be taught–to college students has to include training in visual and auditory rhetoric, both as producers of composed materials and as consumers of composed materials.

So there you have my two cents’ worth of ideas on a Core Curriculum for the 21st century. It is more than just tweaking credit hours and distribution electives–it is a revolutionary approach to education in the new flat world.

This article is part of ASpect’s March 2010 issue on the core curriculum.

Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Lewis, Harry R. “A Core Curriculum for Tomorrow’s Citizens.” Chronicle of Higher Education 7 Sept. 2007, The Chronicle Review sec.: 20-22. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Address at Vision 65.” In F. Zingrone and E. McLuhan, eds., The Essential McLuhan. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Rosen, Christine. “The Age of Egocasting,” The New Atlantis, Number 7, Fall 2004/Winter 2005, pp. 51-72.

Sunstein, Cass. Going to Extremes. New York: Oxford U Press, 2009.