The Best College for You?

It Depends on Your Curricular Personality Type

As anyone committed to Christian higher education will tell you, faith defines a Christian college's curriculum. But the inverse is also true: the curriculum defines the faith. In a profound sense, a curriculum is a confession—an expression of the beliefs and desires of an academic community.

Here lies a difficulty for prospective college students: they stand in line at a buffet of curricular models and philosophies, each of which presents a different vision of what it means to be educated. Even students considering only Christian schools face an array of options advanced in the name of Christian learning. On such a sea of choices, it can be hard to steer a steady course—hard not to be carried about by every wind of curricular doctrine.

Given this tie between academics and dogmatics, I sometimes think someone should draw up a quick diagnostic tool to help the dazed and confused college-bound navigate their way through the various higher-ed options. Something like this:

Choose the option below that best describes the kind of education you are seeking.

A. I want a traditional liberal arts school with a specified core curriculum that would constitute the principal focus of my studies. A general education in history, science, economics, mathematics, literature, and theology is important preparation for living a well-rounded life.

B. I like the idea of a core curriculum, but it needs to be small and manageable so as not to interfere with the requirements and electives of my major and career trajectory. Five or six required classes in the humanities and sciences should be sufficient: one each in, say, literature, history, art appreciation, theology, biology-lite, and chemistry-lite. We don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater when making curricular reforms, but schools need to keep up with and make accommodations to the times we live in now.

C. I would like a flexible model in which students would be required to take at least one course in a dozen or so specified disciplines, but they could choose which course within the discipline to take—i.e., one English class of any flavor, one science class, one history class, and so on. The important thing is that students take courses in a wide swathe of subjects, but the specific content doesn't really matter. The essence of a general education is breadth.

D. I want all liberal arts all the way, with no majors and no specialization. A core? What's a core when you don't have majors? Euclid, Tacitus, Anselm, Hobbes, Jane Austen—anything and everything is my core.

E. I would like an open curriculum—no core at all. Everybody gets to take whatever he or she wants. Okay—throw in a composition class in here; add a credit minimum there. But the thing should be spacious and flexible. Each student should design his or her own educational experience, and that includes deciding what is or isn't core knowledge.

Based on your choice, you can now determine your curricular doctrine Myers-Briggs style:

If you picked A, you are a CURRICULAR THEIST: You believe that the true university is not the product of blind disciplinary forces or a mere concatenation of courses. It manifests an objective order of knowledge, a harmony. It reflects an intelligent design.

If you picked B, you are a CURRICULAR DEIST: There is a core in the cosmos of your ideal college, but it stands somewhat removed from your life. You believe that there are some salutary aspects to the traditional way of doing things, but we must remove the kernel from the husk. Our modern, scientific, technological culture simply cannot entertain the academic fundamentalism of a bygone era when people believed in all sorts of silly doctrines—Latin instruction, for instance, or the trivium (whatever that is). Reason must reign when it comes to designing a curriculum, but tradition can play a role, as long as it is updated. The best ideas of past ages can still serve as a guide to progressing times and values.

If you picked C, you are a CURRICULAR POLYTHEIST: You do not believe in one exclusive core, but many cores. Like a good Roman, you want to cover all the bases. You offer sacrifices to the gods of several different disciplines: a little meat on the altar of history, a small libation to economics—that kind of thing. At the same time, you are free to show special devotion to deities of your own liking, like video-game design or graphic-novel studies.

If you picked D, you are a CURRICULAR PANTHEIST: Everything is the core, and the core is everything. No particular classes mark the center of your curriculum because everything is the center. Your curriculum is one dazzling monad that includes everything and excludes nothing. You would be very happy sipping kombucha at a Harkness table.

If you picked E, you are a CURRICULAR ATHEIST: There is no core knowledge, and there never was. In your heart, you enjoy singing a modified version of John Lennon's "Imagine": "Imagine there's no lit survey / It's easy if you try. . . ." All traditional curricula are just a projection of culturally constructed tastes and values. Better to have each individual student decide what is valuable. The student is the measure of all studies.

The Soul of a College

Well, okay. Discard this idea if you like, but the analogy between pedagogy and faith still holds. A college's curriculum is not the oversoul of an institution, but at the least it is its soul. We should not say that a curriculum is really a religion, but it does communicate a stance toward spiritual things. An academic program is not just a sequence of course catalogue numbers. It reflects an anthropology, an epistemology—even a theology. A Christian school's curriculum should be a microcosm of the Christian life; it ought to train a student's whole self: his physical nature, his capacity for imagination and wonder, his rational faculties, his heart.

I believe in the spiritual good of a core curriculum. Of course, to say one "believes in" something today often simply means one has an affinity for a favorite cause (like the health benefits of essential oils or something), but that is not what I mean to suggest. I do not believe in a core curriculum the way one might believe in the Red Sox or the Democratic Party. I mean the term core in its strictest sense; that is, I consider a college's core to be an article of faith that must be either affirmed or denied. When a college adopts a core, it asserts that there is such a thing as core knowledge.

Unless we are willing to dump the notion of value altogether, some things must be more important than other things. Some subjects must take priority over the rest. Not every meal that I eat is as good as every other. Not every Christopher Nolan film is as good as every other. Cream will rise to the top. In the context of college learning, the question becomes, What knowledge is core knowledge for living a good life? What must a person know to flourish? The customization of curricula across the country—at elite, state, and religious schools alike—suggests the view that either there is no such thing as core knowledge or, if there is, we can't really say what it is. Students must decide.

Of course, the important point to observe here is that these concepts are metaphysical in nature. They cannot be tested in a lab or observed in a petri dish. They are a part of one's dogma. In the world of higher education, a core curriculum is simply the logical outcome of belief in a divinely charged cosmos where truth exists and is knowable.

"The good school," David Hicks writes in Norms and Nobility, "does not just offer what the student or the parent or the state desires, but it says something about what these three ought to desire." This is the purpose of a core: to tell us what we should love and what we should take into our souls. Certainly, there are practical benefits that flow from the idea of core knowledge and a core curriculum. A core establishes a program. It provides a list of requisites. But the undergirding principle for adopting a core is love. Rightly understood, the core is not a checklist or an arbitrary common agenda. It is a loving -affirmation of an objective order.

Some marketers tell us that young people want options in higher education and that colleges and universities must adapt to this diversification of interests or die. Perhaps we should approach these reports with caution—not because we doubt the data behind them, but because their conclusions smack of the kind of monolithic judgments that the middle-aged often pass on the young. To speak of "what young people want" is an abstraction (and an unhelpful one at that) because every generation harbors a mix of desires—some noble, some ignoble. No generation is single-minded or static, thank God.

My experience as a teacher is that many students want reality more than options. The pursuit of core knowledge through a core curriculum is as real as it gets. Are there really hungry souls who would give up slick major for an education in first things? Absolutely. Let we who are administrators, teachers, parents, and friends go find those kindred spirits. Let's feed those sheep.