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BACHELOR OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES
Core Courses |
 Building on the foundations laid in the key courses, the student chooses at least one additional course from each of four core areas, as follows:
Core A: Society and Self
Core B: The Individual and the Material World
Core C: The Arts and Human Experience
Core D: Consciousness and Reality
Core Area A: Society and Self
- Problems and possibilities before us at the start
of a new century as we move toward a genuinely "global
culture"
- The relationship between the individual and all
kinds of human groups, the context of human
interaction where the individual finds many of the
dimensions of the self.
- Ideas, attitudes, beliefs that flow between
society and the individual and which result in the
political and economic arrangements that make
life-in-common possible.
- Historical and economic developments, geographical
facts, analytical models, and moral questions
necessary to understand the dynamics of individuals
and their communities.
- Moral and ethical under-pinnings of our patterns
of social interaction and how these affect issues such
as race, gender, and class.
- Questions concerning whether the goals of human
dignity, political justice, economic opportunity, and
cultural expression are being enhanced or destroyed by
specific historical developments, cultural practices,
economic arrangements, or political institutions. For
example: How, in the face of that compelling force, do
we shape the kind of society that values and protects
the individual? How do we become the kinds of
individuals who understand and help foster the just
society?[top of page]
Core Area B: The Individual and the Material
World
- Science and technology and their relationship to
the individual and society.
- The methods of science and important information
which has been discovered through their
applications.
- Some of the crucial issues posed by our culture's
applications of science and technology and, adversely,
the cultural consequences of a materialist
worldview.
- How science and technology challenges all areas
of our lives.
- How, for better and for worse, as inheritors of
the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, we
intervene in our material world technologically.
- Scientific aspects of particular social issues, or
an issue of personal concern, the sense of science as
a social endeavor.
- The values implicit in a particular
technology[top of page]
Core Area C: The Arts and Human Experience
- What and why humans create literature, epics,
poetry, drama and other literary forms, the visual
arts, languages, architecture, music, dance, the
writings of philosophers and the thought and
literature of the world's religions.
- The inner world of creativity and individual
values as well as the questions about how we arrive
at a sense of meaning and purpose, ethical behavior,
and a sense of beauty and order in the world.
- Deep and significant aspects of ourselves which
may otherwise remain obscure and therefore
troubling.
- Important questions about life and death, about
feelings, about the ways we see things, and
occasionally answer them.
- The metaphors, which help us recognize and become
aware of the interrelations of all the areas of
inquiry humanity has developed.
- Images from which we may learn about our reality or
realities of other times.
- Creative and intuitive thinking processes that
lead to an understanding of the aesthetic
experience.
- How the arts can be an end in themselves, as well
as a means to an end. [top of page]
Core Area D: Structures of Consciousness
- "Reality" as a result of many factors, some of
them psychological, some biological, some
philosophical, some social and the many aspects of
"being" or existence, reaching from the physical to
the metaphysical.
- Consciousness as affected by the result of our
gender, our ethnicity, our health, the ways in which
we were reared, the social stratum in which we find
ourselves, the beliefs that were engendered in us, and
other factors.
- Consciousness as occurring across a spectrum of
potentials (conscious/unconscious,
rational/irrational, egocentric/transpersonal,
masculine/feminine) that influence our personal and
collective realities.
- Human needs at various levels of emotional,
religious or spiritual, intellectual, and
transpersonal or universal disciplines, practices, and
experiences.
- One of the major concerns of people in all places
at all times has been: what are the components of
"being human?"
- The range of answers which are sometimes
perplexingly inconsistent with one another, and yet
their very divergence itself suggests something about
the powerful complexity of the human individual.
- The study of biology as it relates to psychology,
consciousness as it affects and is affected by
perceptions of reality.
- Meaning-making as necessary human achievement, and
identity formation as it is understood in the light of
developmental psychology and the nature-nurture
controversy. [top of page]
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Questions or Comments
Hutchins School of Liberal Studies * Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave. * Rohnert Park, CA 94928-3609
tel: 707.664.2491 * fax: 707.664.4389 * Email
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