BOOKS
GOING TO COLLEGE
COLLEGE: THE UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCE IN AMER–
ICA. REPORT OF THE CARNEGIE FOUNDATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF TEACHING. By Ernest
L.
Boyer. Harper and
Row. $19.95.
One of the most persistent - and most misconceived - of
modern complaints is one that bemoans the loss of a "clear vision"
from higher education and calls for a unified curriculum based on
commonly shared values. The complaint is misconceived, though
not necessarily inaccurate, because what is seen as a loss of shared
values, or a collapse of standards , or a descent into educational
"relativism" should just as easily be applauded as the outcome of a
democratic revolution. Even many on the left view the trend in aca–
demic literatery criticism toward theory, feminism, Marxism, and
other forms of radicalism as if it were an invasion by barbarians
rather than simply a reflection of the fact that social groups other
than the usual ones have begun to have a say in how literary culture
will be defined.
This is not to say that it is undemocratic to complain that the
college curriculum has become incoherent, and it is self-deceiving to
rationalize curricular incoherence as if it were democratic progress .
Those who are currently proposing a return to shared educational
values are reacting to a real problem, and one for which traditional
progressive solutions have proved inadequate. The common mistake
in this reaction, however-and it is the mistake which has haunted
the whole tradition of General Education in America-is the as–
sumption that the only practical cure for incoherence is to secure a
consensus on educational content.
It
is this assumption that results
in prescriptions which would be worse than the disease if they were
to work, though fortunately for everybody they never do .
The current demand that the curriculum be integrated around
some unitary conception of a common educational content is only
the latest in a long series of such efforts, which have always ended in
futility. This futility is often recognized, and in fact presupposed, in
jeremiads against educational decline, which often have the air of
