The Core Curriculum

THE CORE. Many colleges and universities emphasize liberal arts. They have core curricula whose broad requirements students must meet by selecting from a range of science and humanities courses. The goal is that students acquire a general education.

The University of Dallas shares this intent. As part of its core, it requires students to take courses in such traditional subjects as math and the sciences, fine arts and foreign languages, but in addition to setting these requirements, the University of Dallas has extended the concept of a liberal arts education a step further by constructing a specific sequence of fifteen courses that all students take—the Common Core Curriculum. This curriculum is devoted to studying those works that have been the most influential in shaping and revolutionizing the history of thought. When freshmen arrive in their first semester, they all begin by reading Homer and Vergil and Plato and Aristotle together. By the time they graduate they have read Aeschylus and Sophocles, Thucydides and Livy, Augustine and Aquinas, More and Calvin, Shakespeare and Milton, Descartes and Kant, Dostoevsky and Melville, Hegel and Heidegger, and other authors who created the tradition that defines us.

Reflection reveals to us that this tradition is a conversation among the greatest minds, discussing the issues of greatest concern to all of mankind. To assess this tradition, to accept, to modify, to reject any part of it, to think and to live in freedom with it or from it, we must all join this conversation at the highest possible level with every resource at our command. A true core curriculum enables us to do that. It teaches us to listen attentively to the most powerful and articulate voices from the past, to reflect long and deeply on what they say, to engage in animated argument with each other about what they mean, and then, after sifting and weighing and testing, to make up our own minds.

By putting a systematic and careful study of great books at the center of our education, we gain a familiarity with the full range of human experience and an understanding of the noblest moments in the history of human thought. In this way we prepare ourselves to live full, free, active lives, and we learn what we need to know in order to enter any discussion with authority, whether in court or church or classroom or council.

Texts in the Common Core Curriculum

Courses in the Common Core Curriculum and their Texts