Lit Hum a year later

Much has been said about the Core: It provides a firm grounding in the western canon; it contains too many dead white males; it is a perfectly good impetus for a hunger strike; it is one of the reasons many students (including yours truly) came to Columbia. The Columbia College bulletin calls it “the cornerstone of a Columbia education.” My roommate calls it “a royal pain in the ass.”

One of the things not often said about the Core, however, is that it is useful. The bulletin does offer that “the skills and habits honed by the Core—observation, analysis, argument, imaginative comparison, respect for ideas, nuances, and differences—provide a rigorous preparation for life as an intelligent citizen in today’s complex and changing world.” And this is true. University Writing could make you a better writer, and Lit Hum will certainly teach you how to read and analyze quickly (or at least improve your Sparknoting skills). But one might argue that the skills and values supposedly instilled by the Core—analysis, argument, respect for diverse ideas—could just as easily be imbued by an alternative course of study—say, one found at any of the other top universities. The fact is that it is the content of the Core that sets it apart, and the content of the Core which most people would hesitate to call “useful.”

The content of which I write is that of the first four courses introduced to the curriculum—Contemporary Civilizations, Literature Humanities, Music Humanities, and Art Humanities. They are classes chiefly concerned with the Western Cannon, and expose students to many of the great thinkers, writers, musicians, and artists of the Western world. The question is why.

I am not, by any means, equipped to fully answer that question. As a sophomore I have only completed one of the aforementioned classes: Lit Hum. Only time and chance will determine just how useful an education in the Core proves to be in the adult world of job markets and families. I can, however, attest to how useful the content of Lit Hum has been during my as-yet brief time in college.

It began first semester freshman year, when I walked into Modern Poetry, which I chose because I liked two of the poets mentioned in the course description, and not because I knew they were “modernists,” or because I had any real idea of what “modernism” was. The first lecture was a wakeup call—the first sign that my college education would be very, very different from my experience in high school. It took about two more sessions before the material stopped going over my head, and three more after that before I worked up the courage to raise my hand and participate.

Most significant, however, was that as the semester wore on, my ability to analyze the poetry improved not just because I had been listening to my professor do analysis for months, but also because the works I was reading in Lit Hum were directly referenced in much of the modernist poetry we were studying. So when I came upon poems by Yeats like “Adam’s Curse” or “No Second Troy,” my knowledge of Genesis and The Iliad helped me understand the context of the poems better than I ever could have from only reading the footnotes. The same was especially true later when we came to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both of whom referenced Homer, Ovid, and Dante so much that William Carlos Williams got sick of it all and decided to give the poet’s version of a slap in a face by referencing a red wheelbarrow and some chickens. At least, I think that’s what I was supposed to take away from the class.

The education we are getting here with the Core—this grounding in the Western Canon—is not just knowledge that helps you seem smart at the proverbial cocktail party. Classes like Lit Hum add context to and enrich our education going forward. Even this year, in Contemporary Civilizations, Machiavelli references battles and historical figures straight out of Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides. In Music Hum, we learn that Wagner, in writing opera, wanted to harken back to what he believed were the glory days of Ancient Greece, when, in the dramas we read in Lit Hum, all of the arts—literature, drama, music, dance, and gymnastics—were fused into one mode of expression. In psychology, we learn that Aristotle, of all people, could be considered the father of that field of study.

Of course, one might argue that the content of the Core is only useful to people taking courses in the humanities, or only in the setting of other Core classes. And this is true to a certain degree—the literature read in Lit Hum may be more immediately useful to an aspiring English major than a math major. But to a large extent, the content of the Core offers context not just for ideas encountered in later academic settings, but also for the ideas that govern our world—why we study math, why we search for truth, how to best govern a state, how we can learn from history, what the purpose of art is, etc. It is this context which could be said to be the goal of education, the opposite of ignorance. It is what will allow us, both in our lives as college students, and perhaps even later in that world of job markets and families, to make informed decisions about any problems that cross our paths. And if, in the meantime, it helps me be a little less stupefied by “The Wasteland”—well, I will take that too.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.

Tags: Opinion, Neil Fitzpatrick, Core, Lit Hum