In the period after World War II American universities debated a proposal to restructure postsecondary and secondary curricula around a "core" of courses devoted to the humanities. The foremost proponent of this idea, University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, hoped it would cultivate a public familiarity with what he called "the tradition of the West." Educational curricula prior to the 1940s included many humanities disciplines literature, art, music, political and social philosophy but the dominant curricular tendency was toward the sciences, economics, and psychology. Curricula at the time also tended toward specialization and fragmentation; many progressive educators, for example, argued that education could be streamlined by having engineers study engineering rather than take classes in music appreciation. Hutchins criticized such a philosophy as simplistic, arguing that narrow, specialized education undermined tradition and led to a technical, mercantile culture without a strong set of values. His.....
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