A Harvard undergraduate has reignited a familiar debate about American schooling by arguing that students who complain about weak general-education requirements are dodging their own responsibility to read and learn on their own time.
The student’s essay, circulating in commentary this week, takes aim at Harvard’s Program in General Education, the latest in a string of core-curriculum models the university has tried and largely failed to satisfy students with. As the student put it, “Complaints about the College’s current Program in General Education, it often feels, are second in number only to those about the grading cap. Previous iterations — the Core, and before that, the original General Education program — were little more loved.”
But rather than simply cataloguing the program’s shortcomings, the student turned the argument back on students themselves, describing a pattern of what was called “learned-helplessness” toward the curriculum: if a course on a given subject isn’t offered or doesn’t fit a schedule, many students conclude the subject simply won’t be learned. “Are we to simply throw up our hands and blame Harvard for our lack of a sufficiently broad education? Are we so helpless and pathetic as to pretend that we may only learn what the College elects to teach?” the student wrote.
A commentator picking up the essay this week argued the same criticism applies well beyond Harvard’s gates, to American education broadly. The writer, who said he graduated college 40 years ago with a degree in biology, a minor in chemistry, and an additional minor in history picked up purely out of personal interest, said his own general-education courses were similarly weak decades ago — and that the fix was the same then as now: read on your own.
The writer traced his own habit of self-education to childhood, recalling that his father had him reading Aristotle at age 14, and that both of his parents were avid readers who could speak knowledgeably on a wide range of subjects because of it. He said he still reads across genres, from light fiction to denser philosophy, and had recently reread Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations because his 16-year-old grandson is currently reading it and he wants to be able to discuss it with him.
The commentator also pointed to the years after the September 11 attacks, when he said he read the Qur’an himself after hearing widespread claims about what the text said, and concluded that many of those making confident claims about it were mistaken — while some, he said, turned out to be “horribly right.”
His broader argument: reading shouldn’t always be easy, and young people in particular benefit from wrestling with difficult, canonical works — he named Steinbeck, Hemingway, the Greek philosophers, Shakespeare, Dickens, Cicero and Livy — rather than relying solely on lighter, more accessible books. He credited works like the Harry Potter novels with fostering a broader love of reading in young people even while questioning how educational they are, and noted he had even worked his way through James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, adding dryly that once through was enough.
The underlying claim shared by both writers is that reading builds not just knowledge but the capacity to think independently — a skill the commentator argued schools should once again be actively teaching in middle and high school, rather than leaving to chance.
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