University Curriculum—Recent Philosophical Reflections and Practical Implementations

doi:10.4236/ce.2013.412A2015

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Creative Education

2013. Vol.4, No.12B, 100-104

Published Online December 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2013.412A2015

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100

University Curriculum—Recent Philosophical Reflections

and Practical Implementations

Juha Himanka

Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Email: [email protected]

Received October 29th, 2013; revised November 29th, 2013; accepted December 6th, 2013

bution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited. In accordance of the Creative Commons Attribution License all Copyrights ©

guarded by law and by SCIRP as a guardian.

Philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre have recently made a discussion on the univer-

sity curriculum. MacIntyre formulated the problem in the following way: “a surprising number of the

major disorders of the latter part of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century

have been brought about by some of the most distinguished graduates of some of the most distinguished

universities in the world”. The problem is that these universities give inadequate general education. The

situation even seems to be getting worse as Nussbaum is concerned about the direction that curriculum

design has recently taken in some parts of the world. In this article, however, I will cite a few examples of

university curriculum design that give some promising solutions to the problems posed by philosophers.

Especially the new Common Core Curriculum of the University of Hong Kong offers possibilities that

might lead the way to a new and more responsible manner of designing a university curriculum.

Keywords: University; Curriculum; Education; Globalization

Introduction

Two eminent philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha

Nussbaum, have recently published essays in which they ex-

press their concern over university education (MacIntyre, 2009;

Nussbaum, 2010). Both philosophers are scholars of antiquity,

and the roots of their views are to be found in the ideas of edu-

cation already presented by Plato and Aristotle. I will visit these

age-old views on higher education, but my main aim is to look

into some fresh attempts at building a responsible and up-to-

date university curriculum. I will finish by focusing on how the

ancient ideas on education in their new formulations go to-

gether with new versions of university curricula.

Alasdair Macintyre

Alasdair MacIntyre held the John Henry Newman Lecture in

Blackfriars, Cambridge, on June 9, 2009. The lecture was enti-

tled “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman and

Us” and it was published in British Journal of Education Stud-

ies in the same year. MacIntyre argues in his paper against the

more and more popular points of view that regard the discus-

sion on the idea of university as an outdated topic. Proponents

of these types of analyses think that the field of higher educa-

tion is so diverse nowadays that no general doctrine of univer-

sities is any longer possible. MacIntyre disagrees and states that

the views presented by John Henry Newman in his The Idea of

University (1852,1858) are still relevant and worth careful con-

sideration. According to MacIntyre’s view, if we cease to ask

what the idea of university means, we will also have stopped

asking what an educated mind is.

MacIntyre’s philosophical background is Aristotelian and it

is therefore no wonder that he quoted the following famous

passage from the above-mentioned book by Newman:

“While we are men, we cannot help, to a great extent, being

Aristotelians, for the great Master does but analyse the thoughts,

feelings, views, and opinions of human kind. He has told us the

meaning of our own words and ideas, before we were born. In

many subject-matters, to think correctly, is to think like Aris-

totle; and we are his disciples whether we will or no though we

may not know it.” (Newman, 1907, 1852, 1858/73: pp. 109-110;

cf. MacIntyre, 2009)

Does this mean that MacIntyre thinks that we in the 21st cen-

tury are still Aristotelians in relation to the university, but are

simply not aware of it?

During the formatting years of the universities in the Middle

Ages, the works of Aristotle were the main syllabus in teaching.

The reading list for the licentia docendi of a magister artium in

1255 at the University of Paris, for example, included 25 books

of which 19 were from the Aristotelian corpus (Pedersen, 1997:

pp. 278-279). Furthermore, we can find some signs of Aristote-

lian thought in our teaching arrangements even today. Aristotle,

for example, thought that although sight is our most appreciated

sense, we actually learn better by hearing. For centuries pro-

fessors taught by reading books out loud while students listened.

This was called lecturing, and we can still sometimes see that

this background influences our lectures even today. MacIntyre

is, however, not trying to return to the roots of traditional ways

of teaching here. Instead, he seems to think that there is another

J. HIMANKA

aspect of the Aristotelian doctrine of learning that is still up to

date.

According to MacIntyre, an educated mind should know

what he or she is doing. Although MacIntyre does not point this

out, the view is to be found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In the

first section of the first book of Metaphysics, Aristotle consid-

ers what it means to know better (mallon eidenai). It is custo m-

ary to find four criteria for knowing better in the text (Heideg-

ger, 2005, §10b): 1) knowing the reasons or causes; 2) knowing

does not aim at immediate utility; 3) knowing goes beyond

common perception and 4) the one who knows something is

also able to teach it. With the hint given by MacIntyre we can,

however, also point out a fifth criterion.

Right after Aristotle has mentioned the possibility of know-

ing better, he presents the difference between artisans and mas-

ter craftsmen. Here the master craftsmen know better:

“We consider that the master craftsmen in every profession

are more estimable and know more and are wiser than the arti-

sans, because they know the reasons of the things which are

done; but we think that the artisans, like certain inanimate ob-

jects, do things, but without knowing what they are doing.

(9801a-b, my italics)

A sloppy reader might only see here the aspects of connect-

ing knowing better with knowing reasons, but actually the pas-

sage also connects knowing better with knowing what one is

doing. What does it mean, then, to know what one is doing?

It is actually not that easy to know what we are doing in a

given social setting. MacIntyre gives an example of how one

might answer the question, “What are you doing?”: “Solving an

equation; predicting next week’s stock prices; pleasing my

employer; working late in the office; absenting myself from

dinner with my family; alienating my oldest child” (p. 359). In

any given situation the answer to the question, “What are you

doing?” is more complicated than one might at first think. One

must be educated even to understand the scope of the question,

and to answer the question requires quite an extensive educa-

tion.

MacIntyre presents his critique against our present university

curriculum. He points out that some important questions go

unasked in the contemporary curriculum, such as the question

of human beings and their self-reflection in general (cf. 355).

The critique then proceeds onto a more concrete level. MacIn-

tyre asserts that “a surprising number of the major disorders of

the latter part of the twentieth century and the first decade of

the twenty-first century have been brought about by some of the

most distinguished graduates of some of the most distinguished

universities in the world.” This is the result of “an inadequate

general education … that has made it possible for those gradu-

ates to act decisively and deliberately without knowing what

they are doing.” (p. 361). MacIntyre gives three examples of

such disasters: the Vietnam War, the policies of the United

States towards Iran and the present world economic crisis.

As a forerunner of the last-mentioned disaster MacIntyre

points out the case of Long-Term Capital Investment. The col-

lapse of this hedge fund in 1997 was so massive that for a short

time it threatened the entire financial system (p. 361). The ex-

ecutives of the fund knew what they were doing as far as

mathematics and economic theory were concerned. As the col-

lapse demonstrated, what they did not in fact know was what

they were doing in the actual world with people, because they

lacked “historical knowledge of two kinds of contingency:

knowledge in depth of the histories of risk-taking firms and of

the vicissitudes encountered in those histories and knowledge

of the politics of the different cultures within which markets

operate” (p. 361).

To sum up, MacIntyre thinks we should still ask what an

educated mind is. His proposal for an answer is: an educated

mind knows what she or he is doing. In addition, in a democ-

ratic society there is one particularly important act, voting,

during which we should know what we are doing. It follows

that we should be able to recognize the people who know what

they are doing.

Martha Nussbaum

Another modern Aristotelian philosopher, Martha Nussbaum,

has also dealt with these questions in her book Not for Profit:

Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). According to

Nussbaum we should still teach in the Socratic manner and

stimulate students to think and argue for themselves. Nussbaum

also stresses that our problems today are global in their scope. It

follows that we should develop strategies to make students

global citizens.

In comparison with MacIntyre, Nussbaum is more in debt to

Plato than to Aristotle. She writes “the dialogues of Plato are

second to none for their capacity to inspire searching, active

thinking, with the life and example of Socrates up front to in-

spire” (p. 55). As an example Nussbaum points out the famous

section where Socrates teaches the slave boy to double the area

of a square in Plato’s dialogue Meno. Socrates there asks doz-

ens of questions and draws figures on the sand until the boy

realizes the answer himself. The point is that the boy has to

figure out the answer himself without Socrates telling it to him.

As the student was only a slave and did better than many lead-

ing figures of Athens in discussion with Socrates, this also

demonstrates how Socratic critical inquiry is utterly non-au-

thoritarian: “the status of the speaker does not count, only the

nature of the argument” (pp. 50-51).

This Platonic or Socratic point of view that the student him-

self or herself should be an agent in learning holds a strong

position in Western views on education. The proponents of this

view include, for example, René Descartes, François de Féne-

lon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schelling, Wilhelm von

Humboldt, Victor Cousin and J. V. Snellman (Himanka, 2012).

Nussbaum, however, points out that a similar Socratic view on

education can be found even outside Europe from very early on

already.

When the student is not understood as a passive listener but

as an active self in teaching, the student will gradually learn

what it means to be a responsible subject in society. He or she

will develop a capacity to empathy, understand others as sub-

jects and learn to understand what kind of responsibilities we

have in different groups and societies. In this way the student

will learn how to be a citizen in a democratic society and a

citizen of the world.

Nussbaum has her own opinion on how this kind of educa-

tion should be arranged at the university level. She argues

strongly for the liberal arts model of curriculum that is used in

many major universities in the United States. Although the

model has turned out to be very successful, it is no longer seen

as an example to be followed. It is this development that wor-

ries Nussbaum.

To sum up: According to Nussbaum, the university curricu-

lum should still include sections that follow the liberal arts

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J. HIMANKA

model and give all students a wide cultural education. The So-

cratic model where the student is an active participant and

where the argumentation rules over the authority of the speaker

is the best way to educate people in democratic societies.

There are, however, counter examples to the development

described by Nussbaum. The University of Winchester (UK),

for example, has started a programme called Modern Liberal

Arts. The starting point there is that the important questions we

humans need to ask cannot be contained within a single aca-

demic discipline. I visited the programme a few years ago and

was impressed how the students were really able to handle the

big questions from the perspective of their own situations. In

order for this to happen, students, however, need good supervi-

sion, and that presupposes capable professors. Perhaps we

could find other examples of encouraging trends within higher

education? Let us therefore take a look at what else is happen-

ing in university curriculum design. I will take two examples,

Stanford and Hong Kong.

Stanford University

In the late 1980’s, there was a big debate over the university

curriculum in Stanford University. During the first few months

of 1988, the University, then in the midst of its centennial cele-

bration, found itself constantly in the national news. The debate

dealt with the question whether or not to retain a list of fifteen

mandatory works in the first-year course of Western culture.

The problem was that these courses said nothing or very little

about the non-European cultures. On one side of the debate,

Stanford Black Student Union called the course “racist” and on

the other side, a local newspaper reported the Senate’s aban-

donment of the list with the headline “Stanford Puts an End to

Western Civilization.” I will not focus on the debate here, but

will instead turn to a recent report by Study of Undergraduate

Education at Stanford (SUES) (Lindenberger, 1990).

The SUES report tells us that “the curricular wars” of the

1980s had their impact. Now the goals of education are not

defined by their content. Instead, the aims of education are

described as capacities that students will have when they

graduate. How does the report itself, then, describe the aims of

Stanford education?

The part of the report that deals with the aims of Stanford

education starts by pointing out that “Stanford grounding grant

states the university’s ‘object’ succinctly: ‘to qualify its stu-

dents for personal success, and direct usefulness in life.’” Here

we are immediately in conflict with the philosophical views

presented above. In what follows, however, the report turns to a

direction that is much more in agreement with the philosophers.

The report sets three major aims for Stanford education. The

first one stresses that the graduates should be able to communi-

cate effectively. At the end of the section, the report affirms that

the aim is not only a student’s personal success: “In a world ri fe

with misunderstanding and riven by all manner of political and

sectarian dispute, nothing is more important to responsible citi-

zenship than the capacity to communicate” (p. 12).

The second aim of Stanford education consists of the capaci-

ties students should acquire during their years at Stanford. The

list includes critical thinking, aesthetic and interpretative judg-

ment, formal and quantitative reasoning skills and an ability to

think historically. The list does not include the social skills

which Nussbaum valued so highly. However, I will discuss

these in conjunction with the third aim of Stanford education.

Before moving on to the third aim, the report points out that

the students having acquired the above-mentioned skills are

well on their way to personal success. The report is not content

with this, however: “Yet if the history of the modern world

teaches us anything, it is that knowledgeable and skillful people

are capable of doing great harm as well as great good.” (p. 12)

This we saw with MacIntyre’s examples such as the Vietnam

War. Does the report, then, follow the lines set by philosophers

with its third aim?

The third aim is the most important one from our perspective.

The report states:

“If our graduates are to assume the responsibilities of local,

national, and global citizenship, they need not only deep

knowledge and well-honed skills but also a wider set of char-

acteristics and competencies: a sense of personal and social

responsibility; ethical and moral reasoning skills; an apprecia-

tion of cultural difference, as well as of human communality;

the ability to work collaboratively in diverse teams; tolerance,

generosity, and a broad capacity to empathy.” (p. 12)

The third aim underlines responsibility, empathy and com-

munality and is thus well in line with the aims set by our phi-

losophers.

The University of Hong Kong

My second example of a university curriculum is the new

Common Core Curriculum of the University of Hong Kong.

The university had prepared this four-year undergraduate cur-

riculum for five years before it was launched in full in 2012.

The curriculum is called common because it deals with matters

which are common to all human societies and are issues of

fundamental importance to all humankind. It is called core

because after taking these courses students will hold the core

values of a democratic society. The curriculum is designed to

provide a fundamental common learning experience for all

University of Hong Kong undergraduate students. It seems that

MacIntyre’s questions on human beings and their self reflection

are presented in a contemporary c urr ic ulum after all .

What will the student study within the Common Core Cur-

riculum? The introduction in the Student’s Handbook informs

us that the curriculum is “designed to help students see the

interconnectedness and interdependent nature of human exis-

tence through exploring common human experiences”. The

curriculum does not only change the emphasis from content to

capacities but goes on to focus on experiences common to all

human beings. The curriculum is highly ambitious as it aims to

explore fundamental human experiences instead of just in-

creasing the student’s knowledge of these things. How is this to

be done? Let us take a glance at the goals.

The Common Core Curriculum sets four goals. The fourth on

the list comes close to the second aim of Stanford education

and deals with the intellectual skills that will be further en-

hanced in disciplinary studies. We are here mainly interested in

the first three goals.

The first goal aims to enable students to develop a broader

perspective and critical understanding of the complexities they

confront in their everyday lives. The second aims to cultivate

students to appreciate their own and other cultures. The third

aims to enable students to see themselves as citizens and re-

sponsible individuals of global and local communities. All

these certainly point to the same direction as the curricula out-

lined by Nussbaum and MacIntyre.

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J. HIMANKA

The Handbook sets further goals in each discipline. Within

the humanities, for example, the first objective is to enable

students “to gain an understanding of the distinctive qualities

and experiences of being human” (p. 13). The Handbook then

gives seven other objectives and turns to key themes. The sec-

tion of key themes first lists traditional fields of study in the

humanities: language, history, literature, visual and performing

arts, and philosophy. The curriculum however sets up a differ-

ent, interdisciplinary list of key themes: The Creative Arts;

Historical Awareness: Past and Present; Language, Communi-

cation and Society; Mind-Body-Spirit and Ethics and Society.

Students who have reached these goals will have a better

understanding of what they are doing and will be more respon-

sible global citizens. How are the students, then, to reach these

goals?

We cannot go into details of the 180 pages long Common

Core Curriculum Student Handbook 2013-2014 here, but we

can take a quick look at what kind of programmes and courses

the curriculum offers. There are 157 courses to choose from. I

will pick up a few examples. The courses are divided into four

areas of inquiry: 1) Science and Technological Literacy, 2)

Humanities, 3) Global Issues and 4) China: Culture, State and

Society. Let us select one course of each of these areas: Our

Place in the Universe (Science), The Last Dance: Understand-

ing Death and Dying (Humanities); Understanding Financial

Crisis and The Political Economy of Growth and Poverty in the

World (Global Issues) and People, Propaganda and Profit: Un-

derstanding Media in China (China).

At first glance, the programme and goals of the Common

Core Curriculum seem very ambitious, almost too ambitious to

be achieved. However, when one studies the details and sees

how carefully the whole curriculum is planned, its goals appear

more and more realistic.

Conclusion

I started with a concerned philosophical comment on setting

aims in higher education. MacIntyre’s example of Long-Term

Capital Management is a good illustration of the problem. The

main idea of this hedge fund was to use the latest scientific

model and hire highly educated academic staff. They even had

two Nobel prize winners in their team. The fund failed misera-

bly, and analyses afterwards had shown quite convincingly that

the main problem was the too narrow education of those who

were in charge (Kolman, 1999; Lewis, 1999; Lowenstein,

2000). If the executives of the fund had graduated from the

Common Core Curriculum, the catastrophe would probably

never have happened. They would have taken the course on

Understanding Financial Crises and seen beforehand what

might happen.

Philosophers suggest that we should take care of a wide

enough curriculum at the university level. Our graduates should

have enough wisdom to know what they are doing and the kind

of education in which they understand themselves as responsi-

ble citizens. The aims of Stanford Education take us a long way

in that direction, but if the Common Core Curriculum really

works in practice, it could take us all the way. That remains to

be seen.

According to the old Platonic educational ideal, we should

align our education with the ideal society. It follows that if we

want our society to be a well functioning democracy, we should

educate our students to be good and responsible citizens in that

type of society. And if we want to have a well functioning soci-

ety that covers the whole humanity on Earth, we should teach

our students to be global citizens. But what are we to teach to

our students in order to reach these goals? How are we to

evaluate whether students have developed “a sense of personal

and social responsibility” and indeed have a “broad capacity to

empathy” as the Aims of Stanford Education states?

The Common Core Curriculum gives some answers to these

extremely difficult questions. The course titled The Last Dance:

Understanding Death and Dying, for example, states that on

completing the course a student will be able to “appraise the

impact of death and loss in societal level” (p. 86). It would be a

good thing to be able to do this if one is responsible for deci-

sions that might cause deaths. And perhaps those who are re-

sponsible for current economic crises would have made differ-

ent decisions if they had taken a course on Economic Global-

ization. In other words, if they had known what they were do-

ing, they would have realized that their actions could cause 50

million people to lose their jobs world-wide (ILO, 2010). In

addition, they should have been responsible enough to see that

these risks would count more than their own personal success.

Furthermore, the organization that chooses the executives

should value people who know what they are doing. In the pre-

sent situation that seems to be a utopian scenario (cf. Lewis,

1989). But within democratic control in a society where citizens

can tell the difference between those who know what they are

doing and those who do not, we would enjoy the benefits of

good education. The Common Core Curriculum does offer

some elements that seem to point to that direction, where the

results of good education are not only successful graduates, but

also a better society or even a better world.

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