Last week, interim President Richard Corcoran of New College of Florida, where I am a trustee, released an executive summary of a new core curriculum at the school. It’s a proposal in an early stage, but the first principle of a solid core is stated explicitly numerous times.
The summary doesn’t lay out particular courses that will make up the New College core, as reform began only a few months ago. But “Whatever the choices made,” Corcoran writes, “the program should be uniform.” Every student will pass through it, and everyone will read a set list of works (Plato, The Federalist Papers, and Tao Te Ching are mentioned). The sequence may run to a dozen courses divided into the two categories of “Techné” (science, technology, engineering, and math) and “Virtue” (humanities), not just the one or two Great Books courses that many schools including Harvard allow a few interested kids to choose.
This “central, common, intellectual experience” will “create a community,” Corcoran predicts, and not just within each respective cohort that passes through. Alterations from year to year will be rare. Progressivist educators insist that as the world changes the curriculum must change. They love innovation and the cutting edge. That desire won’t fly in Sarasota.
“The Virtue curriculum will be stable over time. Alumni children would read the same books which their parents read 25 years ago. The curriculum binds the NCF family across the generations,” Corcoran writes.
This fundamental commitment to sameness, commonness, and stability stands in forthright opposition to
