The normal high school curriculum is
a daily kaleidoscope of unrelated courses: a class in English, perhaps
followed by history, civics and then the arts, each session unrelated
to the other. Emulating liberal arts colleges and the better prep
schools, some public high schools are now offering broad-scale courses
in humanities that seek to relate these disciplines, and to show their
relevance to the kind of decisions students must make in their own lives.A pacesetter in the field is the state of New York, where 100 high
schools have developed experimental humanities courses, using a rough
guideline prepared by state education officials. In most schools,
English, social studies, music and art are linked in a common
curriculum, taught either by a team of teachers or in individual
courses that coincide in timing and theme.Ethics & Alienation. At Dobbs Ferry High School, 20 miles up the Hudson
from Manhattan, ninth-graders spend each morning in a year-long
humanities sequence that starts with the contemporary world, then
shifts back to primitive man, progresses through classical cultures,
medieval times, the Renaissance, and returns to today. One recent
morning began with a student-prepared exposition of Greek architecture,
shown over closed-circuit television in five classrooms. After that, a
social-studies class compared the quality of democracy in ancient
Greece and in modern-day Mississippi; an art class took up classical
sculpture; a philosophy class studied the thought of Socrates; an
English class discussed Sophocles' Antigone. In each course students
tried to determine how the Greeks expressed their attitudes toward
ultimate values.A different approach is taken by Garden City High School on Long Island,
where a group of 100 juniors and seniors take a coordinated program
based on such major philosophical themes as man's search for order and
meaning in life, his adjustment to change and his yearning for
self-expression. In an opening unit on “The World Today,” the
social-studies teachers deal with man's fears of nuclear war, poverty
and lost identity. English classes analyze contemporary writings on
violence, brotherhood, situation ethics and alienation. The art and
music teachers seek to define the values implicit in modern painting,
commercial art, jazz and even folk rock.Hillbilly Opera. In discussing the search for order, teachers show how
this theme is found in such works as Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Divine
Comedy and Death of a Salesman. To help them understand the
difficulties of achieving esthetic order, music students at Garden City
have been assigned the problem of writing operas of their own: in one,
a hillbilly, over his mother's strong objections, goes to New York to
pursue a career as a folk singer and becomes famous. Art students take
a Vermeer masterpiece and, on a transparent overlay, convert his
realism into a cubist painting, while trying to preserve the structure
of the original.
