Brown Will Offer New Curriculum

An "idea curriculum," similar to Harvard's General Education program, will be instituted at Brown University next September.

Fourteen departments, Brown announced last week, will offer courses in the "Identification-Criticism" program, which will be concerned with the "pursuit of ideas" in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences.

One of these courses will be "The American Dream and American Individualism," offered by the English department. Students will study those ideas through the novels of Hawthorne, Molville, Henry James, and William Faulkner, and will attempt to relate them through critical reading and discussion.

When students study political science, they will trace "the development of the concept of liberty." Through Renaissance literature, they will explore the concept of the individual. When they study the Reformation, they will be concerned with the individual's relation to God.

Emphasis on Classics

The new courses emphasize the reading of the great classics, as well as the best of scholarly commentaries. Students will learn their biology through Darwin's "Origin of Species," their psychology through the writings of Pavlov. Their physics will include the works of Galileo, Newton, and Von Helmholtz.

Even foreign languages will be involved in the study of ideas. Those taking French will read Voltaire with a view to the intellectual content of his work. The Italian, Spanish, German, Latin and Greek language courses will be similarly oriented.

When he announced plans for revamping the curriculum in January, Brown's president Henry M. Wriston charged that "most textbooks are hardly worth reading. If they are not barren of ideas, they are impoverished in that respect. The minds of freshmen need to be awakened to a new adventure. The great mistake in American education from kindergarten through graduate school has been an underestimation of the capacity of students."

Books to Remedy Defect

The new curriculum based on the classics will seek to remedy that defect. "The emphasis," says Bruce M. Bigelow, Brown's vice-president, "will be on analyzing, not on memorizing."

The new program will be open to volunteers from the upper half of the present freshman and sophomore classes, but plans call for the extension of the program to incoming freshmen after its usefulness has been demonstrated.

As in the General Education program at Harvard, Brown students in the new program must take a minimum of three courses, and these will count toward distribution requirements.

The announcement of the reorganization of Brown's curriculum came after the report of a faculty committee headed by Bigelow. Study of the problem was begun in 1946 under a $250,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation.