2. Recognizing and constructing logical arguments. This skills is central to philosophy, mathematics and natural science, but it is scarcely less important in other academic disciplines. It includes the ability to discern the pre-suppositions of an argument.

3. Gathering, assessing, and using evidence. What counts as evidence relevant to a given thesis or hypothesis? How is it acquired? How does one assess its validity and its implications? Science, history and economics answer these questions in different ways. An educated person should understand the similarities and differences between the three sets of answers.

4. Asking productive questions and making connections. These habits are the keys to active learning. More than anything else, they are what make learning exciting and enjoyable.

A defender of the status quo many say: "Of course we should encourage students to develop these skills and habits. But the Core already does that! For if all kinds of rational inquiry depend on them, then students automatically acquire them by focusing on specific modes of inquiry." This argument is flawed in two ways.

First, an emphasis on modes of inquiry discourages students from questioning the presuppositions that in part distinguish one discipline from another, and from trying to make connections between different disciplines--or even between different approaches within the same discipline. Second, the notion that students automatically acquire core intellectual skills and habits by taking courses that emphasize distinctive modes of inquiry is pedagogically unsound: no one who has paid close attention to the way people acquire skills and habits would agree that this is what actually happens. Learning to decode a poem or a proof, to construct a cogent argument and support it with evidence, and to ask fruitful questions, are not skills that most people just pick up along the way. Each of them is nurtured by particular activities.

Listening to lectures, however inspiring and instructive, is not one of these activities. A well-presented lecture or set of lectures by someone who has thought deeply and in an original way about his or her subject can be invaluable as a guide and stimulus to reading and reflection; it can serve as a model of how an artist, scholar, or scientist approaches his or her work; and it can communicate insights that would otherwise be hard to come by. But the cultivation of basic intellectual skills and habits requires a different setting. In concentrations, this setting has usually been the tutorial. In Core courses outside the arts it could be provided by small writing-intensive discussion sections.

My own experience (in Science A-18ab, Science A-22, Chemistry 8/9, Mathematics 28/29 and Astronomy 120) suggests that such sections are most effective when they: deal rigorously and in depth with individual topics that connect with one another to make a coherent narrative or argument; have reading assignments that are drawn as much as possible from primary sources and that encourage and leave time for choice and exploration of sources; require weekly or semi-weekly essays, or problem sets in the form of coherent essays, on prescribed topics related to the reading assignments; supply prompt and expert feedback on the essays; allow students to revise each essay in the light of discussion leaders' comments and classroom discussions; hold well-organized and skillfully directed semi-weekly discussions.

I claim no originality for this list, rather the reverse: that nearly every experienced teacher who has paid serious and sustained attention to how students acquire core intellectual skills and important substantive insights would come up with a similar list. I propose, then, that every Core course outside the arts offer a section or sections organized along lines similar to those just sketched (or in some other way that could be shown to promote the same ends as effectively).

The most important changes proposed herein would not be in the administrative structure or the Core requirements. They would be in the goals and rationale of the Core. The Core now seeks to acquaint students with the norms and practices of a (somewhat arbitrarily) selected set of academic disciplines. I have argued that Core courses in the arts should seek to develop sensibilities to language, color, design or music in the context of outstanding exemplars; that Core courses outside the arts should seek to cultivate the intellectual skills and habits that underlie all kinds of rational inquiry, in substantive contexts that are either central to a given area of knowledge or at least broadly interesting and important.

David Layzer is the Menzel Professor of Astrophysics. He has taught in the Core program and its predecessor, the General Education program, for more than 25 years.

The Core invites students to think of academic disciplines as separate

Each Core culture is presumed to have its own language, customs and values cultures

The Core cultures presuppose that only criticism from within is legitimate