First Year Seminar
I The First-Year Seminar Requirement
All first-year students are
required to take two Seminars, one in the fall and the other in
the spring semester. The Seminars are courses in which the student
is introduced to the literary, philosophical, and artistic legacies
of several interrelated cultures. Works are chosen to represent
a wide range of intellectual discourse, from poetry, drama, and
fiction, to history, philosophy, and polemic.
Course Description - Fall 1996 Semester
This semester the First-Year
Seminar explores what constitutes education, and how education
is culturally, politically, economically, and socially determined.
Who decides how to educate and who receives education? Who is
excluded from education and how does this exclusion define education?
In what ways is education important, both to individuals and societies?
How do great thinkers assess their own educations and those of
others? Education has been figured both as the introduction of
a body of knowledge into a more or less receptive (and empty)
mind and as the drawing out of the individual's inherent potential.
How do the two models of education play themselves out in various
works? This seminar will not be about teaching methods, but about
definitions of education; resistance to education; problems with
education; responsibilities in the transmission of knowledge;
gender and education; the Bildungsroman, autobiography, and education;
the philosophy of education; the politics of education; and the
like. Each section will read four core texts, supplemented with
additional readings. The core texts are:
Plato:
Republic
Montaigne: On the Education of Children
Virginia Woolf:
A Room of One's Own
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls
of Black Folk
The seminars have been devided into three groups. Please continue.