Teaching & Learning | The Program in General Education

Harvard has long required that students take a set of courses outside of their concentration in order to ensure that their undergraduate education encompasses a broad range of topics and approaches. As part of the Harvard College Curricular Review, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to replace the existing thirty-year-old Core Curriculum requirements with a new Program in General Education in order to align theses requirements with the educational needs of Harvard College students at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In contrast with the Core Curriculum, which required that students be exposed to a number of different "ways of knowing," the new Program seeks explicitly to "connect a student's liberal education — that is, an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry, rewarding in its own right — to life beyond the college." In addition, the new Program in General Education seeks to provide new opportunities for student to learn — and faculty to teach — in ways that cut across traditional departmental and intra-University lines. These changes take effect with the Class of 2013, entering in 2009.

There are eight required areas in the new Program, and students take one course of each from the range of offerings in each of these areas:

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding
Culture and Belief
Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning
Ethical Reasoning
Science of Living Systems
Science of the Physical Universe
Society of the World
The United States in the World.

For the latest information about the new program, please visit http://www.generaleducation.fas.harvard.edu/.