Core Curriculum: Exploring the Human Condition

It is the purpose of the core curriculum to provide all students with a solid academic foundation and the fundamental tools necessary to continue developing their intellectual ability and inquiry. This goal extends beyond providing answers. It must include raising questions important to the human condition: questions that have been asked in the past; questions that examine our cultural heritage; questions that are asked as a part of the exploration of thoughtful, responsible choices; questions that grow in complexity as the students mature. Typically, these questions might be phrased in the following ways:

• How did we, and others, get to this place in the world?
• How can we think about our lives in this world and discover our roles in it?
• How ought we, both personally and communally, respond to the world and its demands?

These questions, and others like them, have helped men and women focus their spiritual and intellectual lives throughout history. Each generation searches for its own answers, using the intellectual tools available to it. For today's students that search must begin with an examination of their cultural heritage. The search needs to include an active investigation of the complex choices demanded by the present, and also a willingness to raise the questions necessary to stimulate continued inquiry.

To this end, the core curriculum provides students with the opportunity to develop the following:

• ability to communicate effectively through speaking, listening, writing, reading critically and thinking clearly;
• understanding of ways of inquiring and organizing knowledge that characterize the different academic disciplines;
• awareness of connections among the different academic disciplines that integrate knowledge;
• personal responsibility for their own learning and the necessity of raising questions and searching for answers;
• ability to make good moral and ethical judgments - judgments that are consciously made and defensibly maintained.

These questions and capabilities do not exist in isolation from one another. Together they form the intellectual, civic, moral and spiritual framework from which responsible citizens respond to personal and communal questions; and they form the goals of the liberal arts core curriculum at Saint Benedict's and Saint John's.

The core curriculum is completed by fulfilling specific cross-disciplinary course requirements, disciplinary course requirements and flagged course requirements. The demonstration of foreign language and mathematics proficiencies is also a key component of the core curriculum.