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
(Core A classes)

• 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?
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Core Area B: The Individual and the Material World
(Core B classes)

• 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.
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Core Area C: The Arts and Human Experience
(Core C classes)

• 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.
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Core Area D: Structures of Consciousness
(Core D classes)

• "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.
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