> In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want

> In the Nelson dream curriculum, all incoming students take the same four yearlong courses. His common core won't make students read the Great Books. "We want to teach you how to think," Mr. Nelson says. A course on "multimodal communications" works on practical writing and debating skills. A "formal systems class" goes over "everything from logic to advanced stats, Big Data, to formal reasoning, to behavioral econ." I, like you, have a very hard time understanding the logic behind this. I don't have any idea how one could go about teaching a young person to think critically by sitting them down and saying, "to think critically, do A, B, C". I'm all for experimentation, and if Nelson thinks that he can do it better, I'll gladly give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for the data. I think it's hubris of the highest order for him to say that he's going to teach people to think. What he will do if he's successful is teach people how to compete in a modern technological economy, which is certainly a laudable goal. Taking this a step further and claiming as he seems to that the Great Books are no longer necessary for students to learn critical thought seems absurd. Just for the record as people read my comment, I will admit to being as biased as is possible to be on this subject, having gone to both the most liberal arty of all the liberal arts colleges[1] and a large liberal arts university[2]. [1] http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission/program.html http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/admissions/learnmore/admission... [2] https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/ https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/