Education: Disrupted Discourse

What does it mean to be educated?

Not very much any more, at least according to Henry Rosovsky, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University. Rosovsky complains that U.S. universities, including his own, have drifted or swerved from general-education requirements and that students have become specialists without common denominators. One result, contends the dean, is that today’s educated men and women have difficulty conversing intelligently with one another. Says he: “The world has become a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the possibility of common discourse and shared values.”

The dean’s annual report to his faculty and a special task force report on basic curriculum requirements at Harvard both offer suggestions on how to re-establish that possibility. Among the recommendations: students should have an “informed acquaintance” with mathematical and experimental methods of the natural sciences, the main forms of analysis used in modern social sciences, the major religious and philosophical conceptions of man and “some understanding of, and experience in thinking about” moral and ethical problems.