by Jon Lackman | 3 March 2006 | Teaching
From yesterday’s David Brooks column: “I’ve got great news! You’re young and you’re smart and next year you’re beginning college. Unfortunately, I’ve also got bad news. The only school you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic notes, students often graduate ‘without the kind of core knowledge that you’d expect from a good high school student,’ and required courses can be ‘a hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at all.’ But don’t despair. I’ve consulted with a bevy of sages, and I’ve come up with a list. If you do everything on this list, you’ll get a great education, no matter what college you attend … The biographer Ron Chernow observes, ‘My impression is that many students have turned into cunning little careerists, jockeying for advancement.’ To counteract this, he suggests taking ‘wildly impractical’ courses like art history and Elizabethan drama.”
