Who wants a color-coordinated, cross-cultural core curriculum?

• Author: Reeves, William J.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, the concept of a core curriculumn has sparked intense debate between liberals and conservatives. The focus of the argument is on DWEMs (Dead White European Males) and whether or not they should make up the core of a curriculum. Famous DWEMs include Plato, Aristotle, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Sir Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, William Blake, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Abraham Lincoln, and Ernest Hemingway.

The curriculum revisionists want to "throw the rascals out," while the canon conservatives seek to "save the cultural heritage of Western civilization." Both of these opposing camps argue in extremes, with the revisionists calling the canon conservatives "fascists," "elitists" "racists," and "sexists," while the conservatives characterize the revisionists as latter-day hippies with Marxist leanings and nihilist inclinations.

All core curriculum proponents, liberal or conservative, have as a guiding principle a basic belief articulated in the 19th century by poet and social critic Matthew Arnold, who stated that education must consist of instruction in the "best that has been known and thought." The present debate is about what exactly constitutes this "best." In such books as The Devaluing of America by William J. Bennett (the former Secretary of Education and Drug Czar), historian Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America, and Dinesh Dsouza's Illiberal Education, the case is made for the classical curriculum that emphasizes Western civilization. Challenging this con-the classical curriculum that emphasizes Western civilization. Challenging this concept of the core curriculum are scholars such as Stanley Fish, the combative chairman of Duke University's English Department, who has engaged Dsouza in a series of debates. Fish's point is that the core proposed by the canon conservatives is too white, too male, too Western, and too highbrow.

In terms of scholarly research, there have been more than 500 articles published about the core curriculum since 1982. Much of this discussion has generated more heat than light, possibly because many of the opponents do not deal on a daily basis with the reality of curriculum revision in America in the 19%.

Horizontal integration

It is a cruel hoax to eliminate Western civilization from the education of America's most recent immigrants. Too often, professors and scholars, who themselves know the classics, choose to disparage them for, immediate political gain...