Feb 11, 2005
Teaching Africa I: The Problem of a Core Curriculum
Ross Douthat’s article in the current Atlantic Monthly, drawn from his forthcoming critique of Harvard and other elite universities, aligns pretty closely with some of Gerald Graff’s criticisms of undergraduate curricula that I’ve praised elsewhere, though Douthat tries to see the problem from the student perspective.
The picture offered is of a four-year course of study that has no center or core, where students learn very little in common save for some general skills and a certain kind of shared glibness, where courses have little planned or intentional connections to each other. It’s a picture that other critics of academia have drawn over the years. Douthat’s portrait is more nuanced and less ideological, and so all the more uncomfortable to read. He describes Harvard students who may have individual courses in the humanities and the social sciences that they enjoyed and found highly memorable, but these courses seemingly connect to nothing besides themselves. Intellectually, the course materials create no shared foundation among graduates.
I’m a little leery of some versions of the complaint, the ones that tend to assume the coherence or virtue, the shared assumptions, of some idealized past moment in higher education or American culture (e.g., Arthur Schlesinger). I’m concerned that even Douthat, whose views I’m fairly sympathetic to, tends to assume that there is some obvious body of knowledge that all students should know and to which they have not been sufficiently exposed.
Every time that academics who are broadly sympathetic to the idea of creating an educational core program get together to actually design it, they find that it is a genuinely difficult and vexing thing to do. To some extent, you become aware that if colleges and universities had that core in the past, it is because they were blithely ignorant (or brutally suppressive) of the possible challenges and complications to their core program. Now takes a kind of arbitrariness to sustain something like St. John’s College’s “Great Books” program, a willingness to just declare by fiat that certain texts are and shall always be the core, so there.
How would I deal with the problem, if I wanted to help fix the problems Douthat identifies? Perhaps each faculty member in an institution could take on the responsibility of sorting their own courses into “core” courses and courses which simply use an interesting topic to explore and master critical thinking, where any subject matter can be substituted as long as the pedagogy is sufficiently engaging. I think we need both kinds of courses, but the key difference is that courses in the second category are more or less interchangeable: anything will do the trick, and thus the only important thing is to have an adequate supply of them.
My own teaching tends to break into three Africa-related courses a year and two more thematic courses on other topics, such as the history of consumption and commodities or (my favorite course) the intellectual and cultural history of the concept of “the future”. Of my Africa courses, some would be substantially about “core” concerns , but most others would be decidedly not so. In this entry, I want to describe which subjects in African history belong in the “core” and then explore the practical difficulties this raises.
Core topics are courses that you think ought to be a part of the shared knowledge of every educated person. Of necessity, that means every specialist has to be highly parsimonious about what they put forward as “core” knowledge. It also means that academics have to take on the burden of being literate about the entirety of the core themselves: you can’t ask your students to do something you won’t do yourself.
African history in the core:
1)The role of African societies in the premodern world trade system
2) The role of African societies in the evolution of the Atlantic slave trade, the nature of slavery within African societies, and the impact of the African slave trade on African societies
3) The nature, causes and effects of modern imperialism within Africa
4) The relation of contemporary African societies to globalization, liberalism, modernity
That’s it as I see it. There are a zillion other things which are interesting about African history, and I’ll turn to those in a subsequent entry. But if any kind of return to a core curriculum is going to work, all faculty are going to have to abandon their usual epistemological quibblings and special-case pleadings, their investments in specialization.
Of these core subjects, I think 1) can be dealt with in a highly compact manner, with relatively little direct address to African history per se. (Say, in a single course lccture on the premodern world system circa 1300 CE.) 2) is huge, and I basically built one course out of my three-course survey sequence around it. 3) is also huge, but potentially could be folded into a more sweeping course on European imperialism, comparative modern history, or something similar. 4) can be done in a huge variety of ways, I think, and at various scales of detail.
Look how messy this is in practice. I’m one faculty member. Here I’ve just defined my subject matter in relationship to a core curriculum in such a way as to have a stake in the design of as many as three courses. Students at our institution take five courses a year on average, 40 courses in their total time here. Am I seriously saying that my own specialized subject matter might need space in three required or core courses? I could teach a single survey of African history to cover this all, but for various reasons, I think that’s a very poor strategy, not the least because it then isolates"Africa" from some connected understanding of the core.
Moreover, that doesn’t solve the overall problem: then my department would have nine courses, one from each of us, that reflected our sense of the “core” concerns arising from our specialization.
The alternative is to make the nine of us design a class that squeezes all of our nominations for the core into a single course or possibly two, some form of a world history survey. I have seen very few such courses that did not seem to me to be a frankensteinian hodgepodge, a quick guided tour of the highlights of contemporary historiography, and most of those that avoid the trap of trying to be all things to all specialists end up being horribly bland as an alternative.
The best possibility I can imagine is perhaps three courses that have some tighter thematic and temporal coherence to them, courses that are built around densely packed “core” themes and questions. Perhaps one on the Atlantic system, mercantilism and the industrial revolution; one on the premodern world system and comparative state formation; one on modernity, globalization and the 20th Century. That’s still three classes you’d be insisting every student would have to take in order to achieve a general standard of common knowledge about history. Note too here that you’d have to deal with the entirely valid separate argument that perhaps college students studying the United States ought to have to take a course on American history in specific. Multiply that by the number of departments at my college or any other and once again you’ve broken the curricular bank.
In practice, if you want a core curriculum that includes history, and you don’t want to go the route of having a bland, overarcing (or crazy-quilt assemblage) single world history course, you’re still going to have a situation where students will have to choose one core course from a set of three or so, and thus a situation where students are graduating without some knowledge that you might feel a well-educated population should share in common.
I agree with Douthat that there’s incoherence and dilettantism in the curricula of many selective colleges and universities. I don’t think that stems entirely from a lack of interest or willpower on the part of faculty. A new core program of studies, if we deemed it desirable, would be very hard to construct even if every faculty member willingly and generously pitched in to build it.
The picture offered is of a four-year course of study that has no center or core, where students learn very little in common save for some general skills and a certain kind of shared glibness, where courses have little planned or intentional connections to each other. It’s a picture that other critics of academia have drawn over the years. Douthat’s portrait is more nuanced and less ideological, and so all the more uncomfortable to read. He describes Harvard students who may have individual courses in the humanities and the social sciences that they enjoyed and found highly memorable, but these courses seemingly connect to nothing besides themselves. Intellectually, the course materials create no shared foundation among graduates.
I’m a little leery of some versions of the complaint, the ones that tend to assume the coherence or virtue, the shared assumptions, of some idealized past moment in higher education or American culture (e.g., Arthur Schlesinger). I’m concerned that even Douthat, whose views I’m fairly sympathetic to, tends to assume that there is some obvious body of knowledge that all students should know and to which they have not been sufficiently exposed.
Every time that academics who are broadly sympathetic to the idea of creating an educational core program get together to actually design it, they find that it is a genuinely difficult and vexing thing to do. To some extent, you become aware that if colleges and universities had that core in the past, it is because they were blithely ignorant (or brutally suppressive) of the possible challenges and complications to their core program. Now takes a kind of arbitrariness to sustain something like St. John’s College’s “Great Books” program, a willingness to just declare by fiat that certain texts are and shall always be the core, so there.
How would I deal with the problem, if I wanted to help fix the problems Douthat identifies? Perhaps each faculty member in an institution could take on the responsibility of sorting their own courses into “core” courses and courses which simply use an interesting topic to explore and master critical thinking, where any subject matter can be substituted as long as the pedagogy is sufficiently engaging. I think we need both kinds of courses, but the key difference is that courses in the second category are more or less interchangeable: anything will do the trick, and thus the only important thing is to have an adequate supply of them.
My own teaching tends to break into three Africa-related courses a year and two more thematic courses on other topics, such as the history of consumption and commodities or (my favorite course) the intellectual and cultural history of the concept of “the future”. Of my Africa courses, some would be substantially about “core” concerns , but most others would be decidedly not so. In this entry, I want to describe which subjects in African history belong in the “core” and then explore the practical difficulties this raises.
Core topics are courses that you think ought to be a part of the shared knowledge of every educated person. Of necessity, that means every specialist has to be highly parsimonious about what they put forward as “core” knowledge. It also means that academics have to take on the burden of being literate about the entirety of the core themselves: you can’t ask your students to do something you won’t do yourself.
African history in the core:
1)The role of African societies in the premodern world trade system
2) The role of African societies in the evolution of the Atlantic slave trade, the nature of slavery within African societies, and the impact of the African slave trade on African societies
3) The nature, causes and effects of modern imperialism within Africa
4) The relation of contemporary African societies to globalization, liberalism, modernity
That’s it as I see it. There are a zillion other things which are interesting about African history, and I’ll turn to those in a subsequent entry. But if any kind of return to a core curriculum is going to work, all faculty are going to have to abandon their usual epistemological quibblings and special-case pleadings, their investments in specialization.
Of these core subjects, I think 1) can be dealt with in a highly compact manner, with relatively little direct address to African history per se. (Say, in a single course lccture on the premodern world system circa 1300 CE.) 2) is huge, and I basically built one course out of my three-course survey sequence around it. 3) is also huge, but potentially could be folded into a more sweeping course on European imperialism, comparative modern history, or something similar. 4) can be done in a huge variety of ways, I think, and at various scales of detail.
Look how messy this is in practice. I’m one faculty member. Here I’ve just defined my subject matter in relationship to a core curriculum in such a way as to have a stake in the design of as many as three courses. Students at our institution take five courses a year on average, 40 courses in their total time here. Am I seriously saying that my own specialized subject matter might need space in three required or core courses? I could teach a single survey of African history to cover this all, but for various reasons, I think that’s a very poor strategy, not the least because it then isolates"Africa" from some connected understanding of the core.
Moreover, that doesn’t solve the overall problem: then my department would have nine courses, one from each of us, that reflected our sense of the “core” concerns arising from our specialization.
The alternative is to make the nine of us design a class that squeezes all of our nominations for the core into a single course or possibly two, some form of a world history survey. I have seen very few such courses that did not seem to me to be a frankensteinian hodgepodge, a quick guided tour of the highlights of contemporary historiography, and most of those that avoid the trap of trying to be all things to all specialists end up being horribly bland as an alternative.
The best possibility I can imagine is perhaps three courses that have some tighter thematic and temporal coherence to them, courses that are built around densely packed “core” themes and questions. Perhaps one on the Atlantic system, mercantilism and the industrial revolution; one on the premodern world system and comparative state formation; one on modernity, globalization and the 20th Century. That’s still three classes you’d be insisting every student would have to take in order to achieve a general standard of common knowledge about history. Note too here that you’d have to deal with the entirely valid separate argument that perhaps college students studying the United States ought to have to take a course on American history in specific. Multiply that by the number of departments at my college or any other and once again you’ve broken the curricular bank.
In practice, if you want a core curriculum that includes history, and you don’t want to go the route of having a bland, overarcing (or crazy-quilt assemblage) single world history course, you’re still going to have a situation where students will have to choose one core course from a set of three or so, and thus a situation where students are graduating without some knowledge that you might feel a well-educated population should share in common.
I agree with Douthat that there’s incoherence and dilettantism in the curricula of many selective colleges and universities. I don’t think that stems entirely from a lack of interest or willpower on the part of faculty. A new core program of studies, if we deemed it desirable, would be very hard to construct even if every faculty member willingly and generously pitched in to build it.