Philosophy of Second Semester Values Inquiry

Mount Saint Mary's College provides for students a fifty-four hour, four year, sequenced, and integrated core curriculum, one of whose goals is to raise questions about human goods and the choices we make in pursuit of them. In accordance with our Catholic identity and mission, our curriculum is grounded in the western tradition and, more particularly, its American and Catholic Christian manifestations. But the study of this tradition, in which most of our students have been raised, does not exhaust our curricular goal. On the basis of this study, we also ask that students reflect critically on the goods embodied in this tradition, on the extent to which these goods are true goods, on the ways in which the pursuit of these goods in the West falls short of the ideal, and on what we might learn about human goods by attending more carefully to the diverse heritages which combine to form our particularly American culture and to the goods identified and pursued in other cultures.

Our goal of educating students to identify, choose, and critically reflect upon human goods is addressed throughout the four years of the curriculum, especially its sequenced components. In the freshman year, all students take a six-credit Freshman Seminar. A central theme of Freshman Seminar is what students choose, i.e., their “choices,” and the course is organized around units dealing with education, work, and values. Through the use of essays and narratives (fictional and biographical) the Seminar descriptively approaches the question of human goods and promotes in students a personal inquiry about the ends of human life: How should we live? How should we be educated? How should we work? How should we act as members of academic and social communities? What goods ought to be promoted in a life well-lived?

Details of Second Semester Values Inquiry

1. Students will be allowed to switch sections between first and second semester. Faculty are urged to point out to students both the merits of selecting a second semester section based on thematic interest and the merits of remaining the entire academic year in the same seminar (i.e., the merits of registering in October for the same section of FS).

2. Second semester Freshman Seminar courses should function within the parameters outlined above regarding values inquiry. In particular, they should:

• use essays and narratives to approach the question of human goods;
• ask students to engage in personal inquiry about the ends of human life;
• involve a substantial writing component (two multi-draft essays and a single-draft essay, as well as other formal and informal writing assignment, possibly including but not limited to journals, response papers, in-class free-writing, and other formal papers);
• include a final exam (this can be the single-draft essay).