Core’s embattled history has weathered numerous criticisms. The most frequent and vocal of these criticisms is that teaching only the canon of Western tradition enforces and legitimizes the dominant powers that suppress and oppress other world-views. These critics propose that Whitman restructure Core curriculum to incorporate competing, non-Western views.

In my opinion, this suggestion is quite problematic, since it doesn’t acknowledge that in order to criticize the Western tradition legitimately, one must first understand its canon, giving it a generous reading. One year to study the millennia of thought incorporated into Western tradition is already egregiously insufficient; to suggest that in that one year, the curriculum should expand to include non-Western texts which challenge the Western tradition risks spreading the curriculum too thin: it risks teaching neither tradition well, and instead, not teaching anything!

Let’s delve into the matter and examine some flawed assumptions in Core’s criticisms. Foremost is the mistaken assumption that the Western “tradition” is a unified stream of thought when in fact, Core texts are rent with discord about the most profound ideas. Anyone who wishes to see the fundamental disunity of the Western “tradition” need look no further that the Core curriculum itself: there is not one thing that the Ancient and Modern agree on either internally or with each other. If Core includes texts irreconcilable with each other, it is hard to conclude that it indoctrinates the student to a given world-view; if anything, this discord teaches us to regard the all views as mere opinions.

Looking outside of the Core curriculum to examine the Western tradition as a whole, we will undoubtedly notice that its biggest critics are thinkers working within it. Consider the most recent criticism of Core, in which Janyk holds that the texts of the Western canon are tools through which the West broadcasts it values: values of domination and suppression of non-whites, non-westerners and non-men. Interestingly, much of this criticism derives from Post-modern thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida; they were some of the harshest critics of the Western tradition, were they not also writers within this tradition?

Furthermore, Janyk refers to the author Paolo Friere to claim that Core represents an oppressive model of teaching. In the “banking” model, the teacher owns knowledge and the student is an empty receptacle to be filled. This relationship assumes that the student is neither a conscious being nor an active creator of reality. The result is the dehumanization of the student; the student is alienated from her humanity: from her reality, creativity, and autonomy. Friere was a Marxist educational theorist, and it’s not hard to detect Marx’s theory of the estrangement of labor in Friere’s work. From which tradition of thought did Marx write? Is Marx not included in Core? One cannot dismiss Core as the legitimizer of Western dominance and oppressioN when it includes both the West’s greatest admirers as well as some of its most vehement detractors.

I do not wish to give the impression that the criticism of Core is unfounded; students and professors agree that it is profoundly flawed. So, what can we do to address it? In my opinion, Core should be even more daring, but also self-conscious. It should admit that the “canon” of the “Western Tradition” is, love it or hate it, extremely important: it courses through the veins of much of the culture of much of the world. Therefore, it should aim to teach it well, which means (gasp) actually teaching it as the canon of the dominant Western Tradition.

However, in doing so, it should also aim to question the idea of a “canon”, and the notion of the “Western Tradition”. In the words of Drury, it should consciously profess that it is neither a sacred “fount of wisdom to be disseminated with uncritical reverence… [nor] a pernicious quest for domination.” It should admit that everything included in the canon, including the notion of a canon, is loaded with historical baggage that often engenders oppression, dominance and inequality. Perhaps it should reserve time to discuss these Marxist and Postmodern critiques, asking how these texts create a specific worldview and who that leaves out.

Core should know very well what it aims to teach, and it should not aim to teach everything. If core were completely restructured to include The Western canon, the baggage it carries, all its critics, Western and non-Western, as well as all its socio-political implications, it will end up teaching nothing! Janyk is correct that Core has a responsibility to admit the politicization of its text, and the questions of justice it provokes. But we cannot forget that Core is most importantly about exposing students to some of the most interesting and influential political, philosophical, historical, and literary ideas, dilemmas and innovations in history: to demand that Core focus only on social justice and the global power structure is to ask for an ice cube from an iceberg.