The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience

This book, coming in the wake of Bloom's and Hirsch's discussions of general education, core curricula and their erosion, looks at the issues from a broad perspective. It studies debates concerning the purposes of liberal education from the nineteenth century forward, with looks back to such landmarks as the so-called Ancients/Moderns debate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Carnochan is well positioned to provide this history. An eighteenth-centuryist by training, he studied at Harvard (where Charles Eliot's fashioning of the debate concerning a fixed curriculum versus a freely-elected one occupied forty years of Harvard's history [and has continued into our own times]). He spent his career at Stanford where debates concerning the positioning of western civilization in the institution's curriculum drew national attention. The history which he provides is very valuable. He concludes by arguing that one cannot have a fruitful dialogue concerning curricula unless and until we understand that dialogue's historical contexts and unless and until we agree on the purposes and values on which those curricula will turn. He provides a laundry list of possible purposes and values--the list consisting of the themes which he has examined in his historical survey. He does not select some rather than others, but adds a note to the effect that the heterogeneity of American higher education is one of its great strengths. Each reader will have to judge that conclusion for him- or herself. I, for one, am not comfortable with `heterogeneity' if it implies that we should all be comfortable with the fact that students at some institutions will not be exposed to books and ideas that are part of the common currency of educated individuals across the contemporary world. Carnochan homes in on the notion of the `local', appearing to argue that some of the items which Hirsch judges to constitute `cultural literacy' (he gives the example of the expression that `there is no joy in Mudville') may be relevant for some people, but not for others. Do people of vastly different experiences and heritages, across our country, really need to know who Casey was? Probably not, but that is not a particularly interesting example. Do people across the country need to know the essential elements of our Constitution? Do they need to know the foundational ideas behind our system of government? Do they need to know enough about nutrition to help prevent cardiovascular disease? Would it be helpful for them to know a foreign language when we live in a globalized economy? Should they know who Keynes was and how interpretations of Keynesian thought affect public policy? Should students receive college diplomas without ever having been exposed to great art, the kind of art that might enrich their lives? Without belaboring the point, the historiography here is helpful, the overall conclusions less than one might have wished. At points it almost appears that Carnochan