General Education Curriculum

The College's General Education Curriculum for its part has two broad objectives. It seeks to develop in you some general skills or approaches to knowledge and to engage you in the intellectual work of the disciplines in a variety of fields across the arts and sciences.

In following this curriculum, you will be guided by two kinds of degree requirements corresponding to these two objectives. One deals with foundational approaches, the other with specific disciplines and fields of knowledge. Within any given course, these two—an approach and a field of study—are integral to one another. An approach is learned by practice in relation to a field of knowledge: your ability to use a foreign language is developed through learning about the culture in which the language is rooted; understanding a work of art is acquired by learning how to write about it—that is, by learning how to use words to describe, compare, question and argue about works of art and the contexts in which they were created and are appreciated; you learn how to analyze quantitative data by thinking about what data mean for our knowledge of natural or social phenomena we observe. Some courses, however, give priority to developing skills and approaches, while others give priority to the field under investigation.

The General Education component of the Curriculum is comprised of two elements. Foundational Approaches develop key intellectual capabilities demanded in a variety of disciplines, while Sectors of Knowledge allow you to tailor your own education in the arts and sciences while gaining valuable knowledge across a broad range of disciplines.

Visit the College website for more information on the College curriculum.