Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Curricular Commons

Curricular Commons Jeremy Cohen Is There an Animating Principle in the General Education Community? More than four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei refused an offer to teach and conduct research at the University of Padua. The lure of twice his salary could not compete with the opportunity to abandon the university. Instead, Galileo was seduced by Italy's equivalent of today's Washington Beltway think tanks where he would become a courtier with the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In other words, the inventor of modern physics and astronomy would never again--never--have to teach undergraduates. A social contract to engage with undergraduates as well as research? Not yet. The goals of higher education have changed over the last four centuries, yet Galileo's echo remains. There continue to be many faculty, administrators, and students who are uncomfortable with the idea that the university grounds we share represent a common space or that as important as research and disciplinary mastery are, higher education includes a social contract in which undergraduate education entails more than research and preparation for graduate study and in which the curricular commons of general education requires more than a simple aggregation of disciplinary introductions. Cambridge classicist F. M. Cornford wrote a http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of General Education Penn State University Press

Loading next page...
 
/lp/penn-state-university-press/curricular-commons-ezyYMDjF4b

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
1527-2060
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Jeremy Cohen Is There an Animating Principle in the General Education Community? More than four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei refused an offer to teach and conduct research at the University of Padua. The lure of twice his salary could not compete with the opportunity to abandon the university. Instead, Galileo was seduced by Italy's equivalent of today's Washington Beltway think tanks where he would become a courtier with the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In other words, the inventor of modern physics and astronomy would never again--never--have to teach undergraduates. A social contract to engage with undergraduates as well as research? Not yet. The goals of higher education have changed over the last four centuries, yet Galileo's echo remains. There continue to be many faculty, administrators, and students who are uncomfortable with the idea that the university grounds we share represent a common space or that as important as research and disciplinary mastery are, higher education includes a social contract in which undergraduate education entails more than research and preparation for graduate study and in which the curricular commons of general education requires more than a simple aggregation of disciplinary introductions. Cambridge classicist F. M. Cornford wrote a

Journal

The Journal of General EducationPenn State University Press

Published: Dec 28, 2015

There are no references for this article.