An 18-course Core maintains Chicago's strong commitment to general education as the defining feature of a student's career in the first two years of the College, but it also creates a modest amount of free elective space in the first two years that will permit students to begin to sample some departmental courses in anticipation of selecting a possible major. The more specialized courses that a student will then take in the second two years can build upon the analytic skills and the intellectual habits developed and reinforced in the first two years of Core-level general education, to the personal profit of the student. But we also want to ensure that our students have a very intensive writing experience in their general-education courses, since we believe that the ability to write persuasively and cogently is one of the most salient and perennial skills associated with a strong liberal education. To that end we have significantly increased the resources available to the Little Red Schoolhouse training program. In the future we will assign LRS-trained graduate writing interns to each section of the Humanities Core and to most sections of the various Civilization sequences as well.
General education is too important to be assigned to inexperienced teachers.
The College has also embarked on a major new initiative in second-language and international education. We want Chicago to become a national leader in the field of second-language acquisition. By the summer of 2001 we will be offering 200 such grants each summer to our students to undertake advanced language training in an approved intensive foreign-language institute. We hope to develop an African Civilization program, to be taught in Dakar, Senegal, and one or more East Asian Civilizations programs, to be taught at locations in East Asia yet to be determined. Internships are powerful tools to aid students in integrating their academic and non-academic experiences.