Well then, don't mind me. I'm still pissed UC dropped their excellent undergrad core curriculum, that was originally developed by Hutchinson himself.
I'm all for a robust core curriculum, but, to be honest, the core requirements consist almost entirely of stuff one can master in high school. And, frankly, why wouldn't one do so? It affords one several fine options for college:
- Finish in three years ---> This makes a lot of sense for anyone because the sooner one starts earning a decent salary, the sooner one can commence saving and investing, and given the time value of money, that one extra year makes a tidy difference later on. (Assuming $2400 invested over the course of that first year, 40 years from the end of this year, assuming 5% returns, one will be ~$16K ahead of where one'd have been were one to have commenced working and saving one year later, making that one year worth, in total, ~$16K more than whatever one collected in cash wages. That's not bad as goes getting value from graduating one year early, and that's without figuring the avoided costs of tuition, room, board, books, etc.)
- Take the standard four years but do it at the markedly less aggressive pace of 12 credit hours per semester (rather than 15).
- Take the standard four years, taking 15 hours per semester, but "beef up" by doing an non-symbiotic minor, taking a hodgepodge of classes that one simply finds interesting, double majoring
- Take a more aggressive route and do a double degree (BS + BA), earn a BS + graduate degree in four rather than five years, or do a 3+3 (BA + JD) in six years or five, depending on the pace one sets for oneself.
I say the core, particularly to the extent it covers the thinking found in "The Great Books," can be done in high school because inasmuch as we were required to take Latin or Greek plus English, theology and history, a lot of the classic writers works were supplemental reading for those classes. For instance if one to Latin, by sophomore year's final term, one was reading original Roman writers and writing essays (in English) on them much as one would for anything one read in English class. It was more of the same in junior and senior year, except that the essays were written in Latin. Since one took Latin, however, one was in an English section that read the same stuff the kids who took Greek did, but one read it in translation. History and theology covered other classic authors works, one's not "hit" in Latin, Greek or English classes, and, again, in translation.
Science and math didn't place much of an emphasis on supplemental reading, but we still had it there. Over the course of a year and a half in calculus, we read parts of
Principia and Euler's treatise on differential calculus. Each term too, our teachers would find some sort of mathematical or science esoterica for us to read and write a short paper about. I know we were actually expected to understand much of those works -- and rarely past the first few paragraphs did I -- but if one handed in the paper that showed some sort of good effort at trying to make sense of what one'd read, one got full marks for it.
I think the point, insofar as so much of how we were taught was about confidence building, was just to get us comfortable reading that sort of stuff and to get us used to forging ahead as best we could when faced with uncertainty and seemingly insuperable hurdles. I'm not sure what I think of that sort of pedagogy, but it's what the teachers did and we came through it none the worse for wear, as they say.
