West still critical in new core

By Chad Raphael

At Santa Clara, we include the study of cultural history in the core so that students can better understand the multiple influences that have shaped us as individuals and as a society.

This involves evaluating important texts, ideas, issues and events in their historical context and considering how they resonate for us today. Perhaps the most important reason to study the cultures of the past is to grasp how history shapes the contemporary institutions and values we often take for granted.

People can disagree on what is most important to learn about the cultural past and how. The present core offers a fairly restrictive way to study cultural history. It divides the study of Western and global cultures into different courses and demands that Western cultural history is taught in a series of survey classes that cover major developments across millennia.

In the "cultures and ideas" area of the new core, students will still be able to take survey courses focused primarily on Western culture. But the new core also allows for other ways to understand the complexity of the past and what we have inherited from it.

Many of the new courses will focus on the historical development of a key theme that shapes today's world, such as "civilization and the city" or "art, politics and propaganda." Each of these sequences draws heavily on historical developments in Western and other civilizations. This should afford greater depth of insight and the ability to appreciate the relationship between past and present.

Moreover, students will not be restricted to studying the West and the rest in isolation from each other. There has never been a solid line between them. If there was, we wouldn't have debates over whether the Middle East, Eastern Europe and ancient Egypt should be considered sources of Western culture.

It makes even less sense to study most of the past few centuries of culture in the West without reference to other cultures. How can we fully understand modernist painters such as Gauguin and Picasso if we ignore how they were inspired by African and pre-Columbian art? How can we truly grasp the many permutations around the world of imported Western institutions, such as democracy and capitalism, without appreciating how they have been shaped by local traditions that predated them, such as Confucianism in Asia?

Finally, what some call Western culture will continue to be studied across every area of the new core, not simply in the "cultures and ideas" courses, but also in civic engagement, where students learn about the history of democracy as well as how to practice it today; fine arts, a requirement now extended to engineering and business students; religion, theology and culture, where Christianity plays a significant role; ethics, which are grounded in the Greek philosophers; and natural science, perhaps one of the most significant Western institutions that shape our lives today.

So have no fear, the barbarians are not storming the gates. Instead, the new core will open up new ways to think about the past, new ways to demonstrate its enduring relevance to our own time and new ways to integrate the West in the world of which it has always been a part.

In addition, the new core will highlight how startlingly different some of our forebears' beliefs and customs were from our own. After all, it wasn't too long ago that the best minds in the West, East, North and South thought that the galaxy revolved around us.

Chad Raphael is a professor of communication.