Goals
Overview
Academic
Skills
Course Guidelines
Overview
The Humanities Program aims to help develop men and women of broad perspective who think critically and creatively, and who communicate effectively. Toward this end it provides a course of study that encompasses past and present ideas and events concerning the individual, community, nature, and the divine, as well as the relationships among them. The program’s courses are interdisciplinary, incorporating insights and information from the natural and social sciences, as well as from the humanities.
Academic
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To lead students to realize that they are the heirs of ages of accumulated thought, decisions, and productions, and co-creators of contemporary culture.
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To familiarize students with major trends in the development of Western civilizations; with aspects of the development of other cultures; and with human accomplishments which are both noteworthy and representative.
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To develop awareness of the validity of different perspectives, and to go beyond relativism to appreciate underlying human values.
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To understand the concept of "community" and to realize the ways in which individuals both develop, and are developed by, their communities; to question social conventions critically and responsibly; and to realize the effects of one’s decisions upon the community.
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To realize the presence and role of power-structures throughout history, and to understand their effects upon human development.
Skills
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Skills in analysis are fostered by the HUM courses’ attention to thought processes, individual as well as cultural, of the authors studied, of instructors’ presentations, and of the students themselves in their spoken and written responses.
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Critical listening skills are fostered by exposing the students to, and guiding them to learn from, large-group weekly lectures; lectures and textual clarification given by their individual instructors in the small-class setting; and classmates’ comments made in open discussions in class.
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Students are taught to contextualize the individual issues, ideas, and practices about which they learn, in order to properly weigh the significance of these.
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Writing skills are fostered by requiring students to compose their thoughts in a variety of written forms (e.g., response notebooks; essay tests; quizzes; textual analyses; formal research papers). Humanities tests are mainly essay, and students write one, usually two, papers per course.
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Speaking skills are fostered by encouraging students’ participation in class discussion and presentations. Because the development of speaking skills requires the opportunity to participate actively and frequently in class, class size is kept small (max. 22).
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Reading skills are fostered by the program’s focus on understanding and contextualizing primary-source texts.
Students are expected to improve these skills
as they progress from the first course
to the last.
Course Guidelines
Humanities 124
Humanities 214
Humanities 324
Humanities 414
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