“My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.” KindBodyMy OwnViewsStudentsCollegePicksAppropriateCurriculumGeneral Education Author:Louis Menand
“I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.” ThinkingKnowsWantTryingKindStrongStageParticularInvolvedVariousSelectHarvardCurriculumAptitudeSpecializationGeneral Education Author:Louis Menand
“The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.” ThinkingTermDisciplineDifficultyFacultyCurriculumSpecialtyGeneral Education Author:Louis Menand
“Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.” KnowsYearsLongIdeasProcessCareersCasesWorryFiveFourBoardsFive YearsFacultyConsensusHarvardGeneral Education Author:Louis Menand