The trend against trendiness
My post about George Mason Law School's decision to require first-year law students to take a course called The Founders’ Constitution prompted Joe Malchow to reflect upon the broader topic of discontent over "trendiness" in academia. Joe detects a trend "quietly seeping, expanding underneath the U.S. News Top 10, getting ready to choke them." This is the trend "of being resolutely opposed to the employment of fashion in the education of young minds."
Specifically:
There is a strain of thinking that says knowledge ought to be conveyed in every lecture; that in human knowledge a hierarchy exists which privileges that knowledge, that art, that political system, those facts which have lasted and have been confirmed through success. Nothing succeeds like success, so why not start out by giving pupils all the best knowledge first? Mankind’s heritage thus bequeathed, teachers can then focus on the resuscitation of failed ideas, or the grasping in the ether toward new ones.
Joe even finds that "the old guard is [not] entirely adrift":
Yale has a Directed Studies program; Princeton has a Humanistic Studies program; Harvard has a Core Program; Columbia has its required Core; and Stanford has a Structured Liberal Education Program. Dartmouth has some catching-up to do. . .
By the by (as Joe might say), the Dartblog has added three fine new writers -- Zak Moore, Jennifer Bandy, and Jacob Baron. This makes the blog even more lively than usual, and means that it likely will remain a force after Joe graduates this June.
JOHN adds: I'm glad to learn that there is a trend toward teaching ideas that have proven successful, but I won't believe it's made much progress until we reach the point where more college students are reading John Locke than Karl Marx.
