Great Issues, the name of a course for seniors in the School of Humanities, Social Science and Education and was open to all seniors in the various schools of Purdue University. It was conceived in 1949 and introduced in 1951. After reorganization, it began in the format described below in the fall of 1954.
COURSE GENESIS
"The Great Issues course for seniors in the School of Humanities, Social Science and Education and open to all seniors in the various schools of Purdue University, has the general purpose of serving as a "bridge" between formal college courses and the continuing study and consideration of major issues by responsible college graduates. The objectives are to develop a sense of perspective in, (a) recognizing that men have faced similar issues through the ages, and (b) that no panaceas exist for settling human problems once for all; to bring together the thinking of people of broad experience, varying points of view, and diverse backgrounds in seeking ways to meet the questions which demand attention in public affairs, and to develop an awareness of unity in knowledge and of the interrelationships of problems in various fields of activity and interest.
Theodore M. Greene of Yale University has
written that the four basic ingredients of a liberal education -- what the
college should give to every student -- are the following:
1. Training in the accurate and felicitous use
of
language as the essential condition
of all
reflection, self-expression, and
communication
with others.
2. Training in the acquisition of factual
knowledge of
ourselves, our society, and other societies,
the
physical world, and ultimate reality so
far as is
humanly knowable.
3. Training in mature and responsible
evaluation and
decision in the controversial areas
of social
policy, morality, art and religion.
4. Training in synoptic
comprehension, i.e, in the
escape from multiple provincialisms which
bedevil
mankind, and in the attainment of
larger and more
inclusive perspectives.
As conceived at Purdue, the purposes of the Great Issues
course fall precisely into the third and forth of these categories.
The "Great Issues" are taken to be broad areas of great, continuing problems of mankind. Within each area certain current questions are taken up for consideration in relation to the broader aspects of the problems. Thus for the first semester the "Great Issues" considered include "Tyranny and Freedom," "War and Peace," "Poverty and Wealth," and "Ends and Means in Education." Current questions taken up include such matters as individual freedom and internal security, the "new look" in United States foreign and military policies, economic stabilization, foreign aid and trade, and objectives and methods of education at the various levels. In the second semester the "Great Issues" are "The Nature of Man," "Man and the Universe," "Right and Wrong," and "Man and the Imagination."
The procedure includes assigned readings in selections from the "classics," lectures each Thursday morning, usually by a visiting lecturer, on some related current question or to present contemporary views as broader issues, and then group discussions later in the week on the readings and the lectures. Each student, then, has a weekly reading assignment, one lecture, and one discussion section. No student is required to attend any particular session, and no attendance record is kept. However, there is a series of ten-minute-quizzes -- one question based on the week's reading selection, or on the lecture, or both -- given at the beginning of the discussion periods, and there are two one-hour examinations each semester.
...
In the discussion sections an attempt is made to have the students express and test their own views on the basis of what they have read and heard, not only in the course, but in their total experience. No effort is made to arrive at general conclusions or "final answers" for any of the questions. Each student is encouraged to develop his own ideas, and to keep his mind open to modify his views whenever additional evidence demands it.
There is no assumption that "Great Issues" represents any thorough coverage of all the fields that it touches. On the contrary, it is regarded as a kind of "capstone" to a student's general education; it gains its depth by drawing upon all the educational experience of the student, and by dwelling on particular questions. In discussions cutting across the lines of formal disciplines, students have a chance to learn a great deal from each other around a focus of concern common to all. It also is a demonstration for seniors that their education is far from complete, that much remains to be learned, and learning is a process which must continue through their lives.
READINGS
Reading assignments are taken from the "classics" supplemented by selections in current books and periodicals.
Assignments for the first semester are taken from the following: Plato, Apology and Crito; Hobbes, Of Commonwealth; Mill, On Liberty; Thoreau, Civil Disobedience; Machiavelli, The Prince; Clausewitz, On War; Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War; Locke, Civil Government; Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Newman, The Idea of a University; Rousseau, Emile; Dewey, Experience and Education.
Assignments for the second semester are taken from the following: Galileo, The Starry Messenger and Letter to the Grand Duchess; Copernicus, On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres; Bacon, Novum Organum; Jeans, Physics and Philosophy; Einstein, The World as I See It and Relativity; Darwin, The Origin of the Species; Bergson, The Evolution of Life; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams and Origin of Psychoanalysis; Satre, Existentialism and Human Emotion; Voltaire, Candide; Plato, The Republic; Aristotle, Nicomachaen Ethics; Augustine, On the Immortality of the Soul; Spinoza, The Foundations of the Moral Life; Pascal, Pensées. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil; James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Aristotle, Postics; Sophocles, Oedipus the King; Aristophanes, Lysistrata; The Dhammapada; The Surangama Sutra."" Source: Extract from GREAT MOMENTS IN GREAT ISSUES, James A Huston, Purdue University, 1971
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