The term “general education,” as it gained currency in mid-twentieth-century America, was originally applied to efforts at the reform of university education, which had become dominated by departmental specialization and by an elective system in undergraduate colleges that lent itself, by the choice of a major, to the same trend toward specialization. The earlier history of these reform movements, as well as their subsequent history in America, tells us something about why “general education,” whether as a term or as a practice representing a diffuse generality, is somewhat anachronistic today and would better be replaced by the concept of a central and centered “core curriculum.” Yet the recent rise of the movement for what is called “multicultural education” underscores the need for equipping that central core with multicultural dimensions.
The genesis of these educational reform movements took place, as we have seen, at Columbia College in the post–World War I era. As background factors, one can cite at least two main trends toward the modernization of education at that time. One was the abandonment earlier of the classical “liberal” education that had prevailed in British and American colleges, wherein the required languages had been Greek, Latin, and sometimes Hebrew. When those language requirements were abandoned in the early twentieth century, a serious question arose as to how the humanistic values of a classical education would survive if students could no longer read these classics in the original.
Another educational challenge arose from the sense that, following the end of World War I, there was occurring both a civilizational crisis and a new intellectual opportunity. The great aim (or at least the great ideological slogan) of that war had been “to make the world safe for democracy.” With its hope and concern for the establishment of a new world order based on the peaceful solution of human problems, it is not stretching things to say that the central concern of this new course and its syllabus was “civility” in its broadest sense.
The topical treatment, the concern for values and ideas, the contemporary interest combined with historical background, and above all the use of challenging source readings as the basis for class discussion became defining characteristics of the Contemporary Civilization course. Another defining characteristic was that it was required of all students, a break from the dominant elective system of which Harvard’s had stood as the preeminent model.
The justification for CC’s being required was a civic one: along with the inescapable trend toward academic specialization, Columbia should educate its students to deal in an informed way with the shared problems of contemporary society. Preparation for leadership and citizenship was undoubtedly among the course’s aims, but the method of personal engagement with urgent contemporary problems, through active class discussion (rather than just listening to lectures), was almost an end in itself. In other words, the discussion method promoted active civil discourse on the nature of civility—learning by doing.
These, then, were the shared moral and social concerns, along with a sense of the college’s corporate responsibility to address them in a collegial fashion, that justified limiting the students’ full freedom of election—while also, it is important to add, limiting the faculty’s freedom to teach whatever its individual members chose in the way of their own specialties. In the interests of education, the faculty had to subordinate their personal research interests to the needs of a common curriculum taught in a collegial fashion.
Subsequently, the idea of having a “required core” spread widely, but one hardly need mention today that the original sense of corporate responsibility and esprit de corps, on the part of the faculty, has since proved difficult to sustain. Thus the true esprit de core has often been dissipated, and today “core” at many places only means “what is required,” and few remember why. Usually, it amounts only to a distribution requirement—at best a methodological smorgasbord—and not a genuinely collegial effort to bring a range of disciplines to focus on questions of common contemporary concern.
This is what has happened at the University of Chicago and at Harvard, which adopted the idea of general education in the 1930s and 1940s with much fanfare. At Chicago, the program was initially identified closely with the Great Books program promoted by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, but subsequently the Great Books program was spun off as a separate adult education foundation, and the university adapted it to a divisional structure tailored more to disciplinary groupings (humanities, social sciences, etc.). Thus a common core was no longer required of all undergraduates. At Harvard, the so-called general education program quickly became departmentalized, and the subsequent reform inaugurated by Dean Henry Rosovsky did little to arrest this gradual fragmenting of the core. In effect, the forces of academic specialization reasserted themselves, “general education” became converted into a distribution program based on a sampling of different methodologies, and the idea of core concerns, key human issues, and major classic texts to be addressed by all students in common became less central to the program.
In the light of this experience, one can say that the very generality and flexibility of so-called general education lent itself, adapted itself, too readily to centrifugal tendencies in academia. And it is likewise from this experience that one may draw an important lesson concerning the need to refocus attention on the concept of a common educational core—difficult though it is to sustain that struggle against the persistent departmentalization and specialization of academic research. It goes to the heart of the educational enterprise—whether it is to be centered on a common humanity. Though “a common humanity” may itself be a difficult philosophical question, if it ceases even to be a question, a key issue for shared discussion, we are in deep trouble and become exposed to all the divisiveness of ethnic and political conflicts.
Core then, in the true sense, has referred not just to content or canon but to process and method—to a well-tested body of challenging material, cultivated habits of reflective critical discourse, and procedures for reexamination and redefinition. A viable core, it was thought, could neither be slave to the past nor captive to the preoccupations, pressures, or fashions of the moment. It should serve rather to advance the students’ intellectual growth and self-awareness, cultivate their powers of thought and expression, and prepare them to take a responsible part in society. The focus has differed in the two basic courses: on society and civility in the CC course and more on the individual and on a shared but at the same time diverse humanity in the Humanities course. In either case, the method has emphasized practice in civil discourse in a collegial setting.
Almost from the beginning, however, the proponents of this core were conscious of its initial Western focus and anxious to extend its horizons. This consciousness is reflected in the course title, “Contemporary Civilization in the West,” and in the original syllabus of the honors course, “Classics of the Western World”; “West” in both cases signified an acknowledgment of cultural limitations, not an affirmation of Eurocentrism. And no sooner had the Humanities course been added to the Core in 1937–1938 than leaders of the movement (though none of them Asianists themselves) began to agitate and plan staff development for counterpart courses in Asian civilizations and humanities, which were added as soon as was practicable after World War II.
The way in which this was done is highly significant for the present debate on multiculturalism: that its focus was on core concerns, humanity, and civility and that the method of instruction continued to put a premium on collegial discussion, that is, practice in civil discourse. No assumption was made of the superiority of Western ways or values or the primacy of a European canon but only of the presence in other major civilizations, and in other major traditions of great depth, complexity, and longevity, of comparable discourses on perennial human concerns and issues, which we should try to make our own to the extent that translation allowed.
This assumption of a parallel discourse had no difficulty gaining confirmation from the Asian works themselves, but, there being no such thing as an “Asian tradition” (in the sense of “pan-Asian”), some judgment had to be exercised in identifying the major traditions or civilizations to be focused on in a one-year course; in our case, Islamic, Indian (including both Buddhist and Hindu traditions), Chinese, and Japanese (with the late addition of Korea). That judgment, however, was almost made for us, given our prior and most fundamental assumption concerning the nature of any tradition or canon: that it be self-defining and self-confirming. Thus it was not for us to find counterparts to Western classic models but only to recognize what Asians themselves had long since ratified as works commanding special respect, either through enduring appeal or irrepressible challenge.
Within each major tradition, this dialogue has taken place through a process of constant, repeated cross- and back-referencing internal to the tradition and largely independent of external involvement except to the extent that, from at least the seventeenth century onward, writers in the West, great and not so great, have confirmed for themselves what important writers in the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions have long held in esteem. Thus in the Islamic tradition Al Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun have based themselves on the Quran and commented on the great Sufis, while European writers, no less than middle Eastern, from medieval times onward have also recognized the greatness of Al Ghazali and more recently Ibn Khaldun. Something similar is true of India, with the Upanishads and the Ramayana taking up the discourse from the earlier Vedas, the Gita from the Upanishads and Shankara from both. And it is true too of China, with Mencius drawing on Confucius, Xunzi commenting on both Confucius and Mencius, the Laozi and Zhuangzi taking issue with the Confucians, and so on. Almost all of the great classics of the Asian traditions have established one another as major players in their own league, members (even if competitors) in their own discursive company.
It is of crucial importance, however, that enough of the original discourse be reproduced so that this internal dialogue can be recognized and meaningfully evaluated by the reader. For the reader (discussant) to recognize and judge the adequacy of one writer’s representation of another requires some familiarity with the original work. Further, though the particular examples given here are drawn more from the religious and philosophical domain, the same is no less true of the literary. Indeed, in any domain the matter of genre, voice, and medium of expression enters strongly into the judgment of what is considered either classic form or canonical wisdom.
(At this point, I should add parenthetically that our program included parallel courses in Asian humanities and Asian civilizations, with a more historical, developmental, and social emphasis in the latter, as well as other courses in Asian music and art humanities. Thus the overall program is less bibliocentric than the discussion thus far might lead one to believe. But it is in the discussion of the classic works that one can most easily observe the kind of internal give and take that should be incorporated in the larger discourse aimed at here.)
So fundamental are the foregoing considerations to any kind of multicultural education that just to include one or two such works in a world civilization, world history, or world literature course is almost worse than including nothing at all. It is tokenism, and even if such a course is equally and uniformly sparing in its representation of all cultural artifacts, then it is only tokenism on a grander and more dangerous scale. If one’s initial framework is a civilization or humanities course already established to deal with Western models, the addition of just one or two Islamic, Indian, or Chinese works will almost always be prejudicial, no matter how innocently intended, for in such a case the individual Asian work, bereft of its own context, will inevitably be read in a Western frame of reference by Western readers. Even if the instructor tries to compensate for this by lecturing about the breadth and variety of the culture in question, the information still comes to the student secondhand, so the latter must depend on the instructor’s word instead of the original word of an Asian author.
No one can prescribe a fixed number or minimum of classic works to be included in any such multicultural program. Nevertheless, one could offer, as a rule of thumb, that five or six such works are the minimum necessary to establish the context of any particular discourse to which one might hope to gain access, assuming that the works are well chosen to complement one another and suggest not only the range of possibilities within a given tradition but also how it has grown and developed from within. For unless the cumulative nature of the discourse—its continuities, discontinuities, and mature syntheses are adequately represented, the tendency of the reader is to see individual works as in themselves embodying some static essence of the culture rather than as landmarks along the way.
Today, in a multicultural education that serves human commonality as well as cultural diversity, both content and method may vary in different educational situations, but a core program should make the repossession (both sympathetic and critical) of a given society’s main cultural traditions the first priority and then move on, in a second stage, to a similar treatment of other major world cultures. Further, to the extent that time and resources allow, it would provide for the consideration of still other cultures that, for a variety of historical and geographical reasons, have not so far played such a dominant role in world history. (In the East Asian context, I would certainly point to Korea and Vietnam in this respect.)
At least two other general principles seem applicable to this educational pattern or approach. One is that it is best, if at all possible, for the process to extend to more than one culture other than one’s own, so that there is always some point of triangulation and so that a multicultural perspective predominates over a simplistic we/they, self/other, East/West comparison. Thus, the Columbia “Asian Humanities” course includes reading from several of the major Asian traditions, which allows for significant cross-cultural comparisons quite apart from those the student naturally makes between his own and any one other culture.
If the effect of this is to underscore diversity, the second principle would be that any such treatment, whether of one’s own or other cultures, should give priority to identifying central concerns. Above, I have suggested “civility” and “humanity” (to which “the common good” or “commonality” could well be added) as basic categories or core concepts, but a main reason for starting the process with source readings or original texts has been to proceed inductively—to ask, in the reading of these works: what are the primary questions being addressed in each, what are the defining concepts and values of the discourse, and in what key terms have they expressed both their proximate and ultimate concerns? Such questions may well be left open-ended, but for the time being, at this stage of the learning process and for purposes of cross-cultural discussion, we should be looking for centers of gravity, points of convergence, common denominators.1 Why? Because as a matter of educational coherence it is best to work out from some center, however tentatively constructed, to the outer reaches of human possibility. And for purposes of establishing the grounds for carrying on civil discourse, some working consensus, initially tradition-based but increasingly multicultural, is needed.
The priorities and sequence just proposed would, it seems to me, be applicable to almost any cultural situation. If one recognizes that other peoples will set their own priorities, one would naturally expect each educational program to repossess its own classics first and then move on to ingest those of others. Indeed, one would concede this possibility to others as of right—that in China’s schools for instance, a course entitled “Chinese Civilization” would have priority over “European Civilization”; in India, “Indian Civilization,” and so forth. Starting from the premise that every person and people needs its own self-respect, as well as a minimum of respect from others, it is essential for each to have a proper self-understanding—to come to terms with its own past. This is essential not only to its own cultural health but to healthy relations all around.
The key to success in such an endeavor is how well one identifies core human issues and how one selects the texts that can illuminate these issues from among the larger body of works recognized as perennial classics in the respective traditions. This requires constant reflection, reexamination, and dialogue among world traditions. But as each civilizational tradition participates in this multicultural discourse, we can hope gradually to expand the horizons of civil discourse and the scope of shared civilizational values, which will be a key to the solution of our common global concerns about the environment, human rights, and world peace.
