In many ways, the college courses at BHSEC are not terribly different from those at typical high schools. Sure, you may have a more flexible schedule, but chances are, your Year One math class will be eerily similar to the one in Sophomore Year, with standards and retakes and overall quiz structure. The same, however, cannot be said with the humanities program. Once you move into your third year at Bard, the typical English class– like literature of the americas– is dropped and replaced with Seminar. The goal of this discussion-based literature class is to cover the influential works that are hallmarks of Western, European, and by extension, American culture. As Year One students, we read texts nearly as old as Western civilization itself – learning extensively about the Ancient Greek Empire and founding of Judaism. In Year Two Seminar (also known as Sophomore Seminar), we continue on the timeline and begin to explore how more recent periods have shaped the Western world we live in today.
Credit: Gifted Curriculum Models
Across all Year One seminar classes, there seem to be some structural similarities. We all start the school year with Hesiod, Works and Days, and Genesis, and then move on to the Iliad. However, we have noticed that different teachers eventually stem away from these books, exploring different topics and pieces of literature. So, we interviewed two seminar teachers, Professor David Meskill and Professor Alan Greene, about their perspectives on their respective curriculums. According to Professor Meskill, there has been “an attempt to establish certain readings that everybody will do” at BHSEC schools across the East Coast, with required readings including the The Iliad and Dante’s Inferno, but that teachers do have “a little bit of room to pick and choose” beyond those select readings. He said that he did not choose to change the seminar curriculum too much since his first year teaching in 2015, but he has rather worked to broaden the scope of the texts he shares. Meskill’s current Year One seminar class is reading texts from other ancient cultures, such as the Quran and the Bhavigavita.
Likewise, Professor Alan Greene chose to add a unit on the female consciousness that focuses on the Western woman’s perspective, and their opinions on the world around them. He believes that incorporating more female perspectives into classrooms is important, as “the earliest sources are dominated by a lot of male voices, even though we know from the earliest female voices that western women are thinking about what it means to be a woman.” We agree that highlighting the female perspective is very important, especially as we analyze our places in the world today. Professor Greene also emphasized the importance of letting teachers be selective with the coursework in this way, saying “the ideal goals or common interests of all the seminar instructors are not necessarily specific to individual texts that we study, but they’re about cultivating certain skills[…] that we very broadly share as people.” The goal of the seminar curriculum is not to tell us how we should perceive the world, but rather to give us the tools to better understand the world around us.
If you are a Year One or Year Two, you surely have noticed the heavy focus on religious texts in the Year One coursework (and if you’re an underclassman, now you know). We begin the year reading Hesiod, a Greek religious text exploring the creation of the Earth, Heaven, Gods and demigods of Greek culture. We then move on to Genesis; the Jewish and Christian creation story of humanity and mortality through Adam and Eve, with further discussions of religious significance later in the year. Professor Meskill gives important insight as to why this is: “All high culture,” – that is, ideologies and information regarded as elite, – “revolved around religion in one way or another until maybe 300-400 years ago, when religion was put more to the side and didn’t dominate public life as much.” Because of this, Meskill states when studying the ancient past “you sort of have to read things that are at least suffused with religion, […] to understand these ancient worlds and other times.”
Professor Meskill also expressed his faith in the Seminar curriculum. While the texts read might seem antiquated irrelevant to our lives today, it is healthy “to be exposed to these very very different worlds: earlier times, or other places, and to recognise that the world we’ve constructed for ourselves now is not the only way that life can be organized.” We encourage any seminar students reading to approach the curriculum from this perspective. Both Professor Greene and Professor Meskill emphasized the importance of noticing how these vastly different cultures from different time periods compare to and shape the world we live in today. We read these ancient stories not only to sympathize with their characters, but more so to be confronted with different ways of living, and as Meskill puts it, to ask “Wait a second – is there any value in that way of living?”
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