BOOKS
students, with their separate roots, a program of general educa–
tion that
helps them see connections
and broadens their perspective?
•
So distinctive are the different disciplines in method or content,
the argument goes, that
there is no way to connect them.
Knowledge
is so vast and specialization so persistent that
shared goals
cannot
be defined.
• • • *
The central question is not whether the curriculum selected is old
or new , disciplinary or thematic - but whether students are
helped to see
integration across the disciplines
and discover
the shared
relationship common to all people.
297
In these passages, Boyer confuses the potentially quite practicable
objective of forging curricular connections with the impracticable
and unnecessary one of reaching a consensus on values. He confuses
connecting different components with agreeing on a single rationale
for them. Thus he confuses "integration across the disciplines" with
discovering a "shared relationship common to all people," objectives
which are not the same. Connecting different disciplines might in
some cases lead to a discovery of shared relationships "common to all
people," but it might in others reveal irreconcilable antagonisms.
There is no knowing in advance whether the outcome of connecting
the disciplines would be more consensus or less but then for purposes
of making the curriculum more coherent for students there would be
no need to know. Dramatizing differences can be as effective a way
of clarifying academic intellectual culture as discovering universal
identities.
The ultimate expression of the premise that educational co–
herence requires a curriculum based on universals is the proposal
of an "integrated core" of general education courses Boyer proposes
as the solution to the curricular crisis. These would explore "com–
mon themes that cut across the disciplines," themes concerned "with
the universal experiences that are common to all people, with those
shared activities without which human relationships are diminished
and the quality of life reduced." (Here is where "quality of life,"
earlier dismissed by Boyer as an evasive cliche, comes bach as a
positive.
