Veritas
As my friends and I sat down to dinner after a long day of skiing during my trip this week to Vail, one of our party, a graduate of Cambridge, began a discussion about the relative merits of the British and American systems of higher education. An engineer with a self-proclaimed writing deficiency, this recent Cambridge graduate proudly boasted that he had survived university without taking a single humanities course.
The conversation reminded me of a recent interview I had for a fellowship to study in the UK, where my Harvard education was impugned as mere dilettantism.
Undoubtedly, my interviewer bristled mainly at Harvard's core curriculum, which attempts to teach students different "ways of knowing". Humanists are enlightened by such luminous courses as "Environmental Risks and Disasters" and "The Magic of Numbers," while scientists dip into the richness of the humanist canon with gems like "Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World."
But the achievements of the young Harvard system are overshadowed by the brilliance and efficiency of venerable Oxbridge. Why bother teaching humanists about the difference between a gene and a chromosome? Why should engineers read literature? The efficiency of this educational paradigm has created such forward-looking British policies as widespread paranoia over genetically modified food and a total ban on human cloning.
As we sat around the table watching the sun set over the peaks of the mountains in the distance, I thought about what my core class had taught me about the different ways the sun is depicted in Mesoamerican civilizations, while my Cantabridgian-engineer friend calculated the amount of sunlight that would be necessary to warm his tea. The products of two brilliant educational systems, could either of us be considered educated?
Robbie Fenster
veritas@oxfordstudent.com
23rd Jan 2003