Syllabus

History, political science, and literature are part of the family of disciplines known as the “Humanities.” Collectively, these disciplines study our culture, stories, and art to better understand who we are, where we have been, and where we are going as human beings.

The Making of the Modern Mind is a humanities course that integrates upper division language arts and social studies curriculum. Student trace the philosophical, political, and artistic development of the Western world in the Modern Era, from the late Middle Ages to contemporary times (1300’s to the 21st century).

Our Essential Question: What does it mean to be a modern human being, living in a modern world?

Skills Goals

This course will prepare you for college-level reading, thinking, discussing, and writing. You will learn to:

• Analyze and synthesize sophisticated fiction and non-fiction at a college-level pace
• Apply principles of reason and rhetoric for clear, well-ordered thought
• Write a college paper: a sustained and well-developed argument, free of mechanical errors, in a readable style

Knowledge Goals

Because this course integrates multiple subjects, you will earn credit for multiple courses on your transcript:

• one year of credit in World Literature
• one semester of Government
• one semester of Economics

Literature

• major Western literary movements from Renaissance and Enlightenment to Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism, and how literature both reflected and shaped the culture of the Modern
• major lenses of critical theory over the last century, such as New Criticism, structuralism, feminism, and deconstructionism

Government

• theories of government and power
• philosophical and historical origins of the American Constitution
• federalism
• the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches of government
• campaigns and elections
• litigation

Economics

• factors of production
• understanding of scarcity and opportunity costs
• market, command, traditional, and mixed economic systems
• how free enterprise works
• laws of supply and demand
• micro- and macroeconomics
• globalism and its issues

Graduation Portfolio Outcomes

• First Semester: “White Paper” arguing a position on a California state proposition
• Second Semester: “What Is Literature?” multi-textual analysis

Exhibition Projects

• First Semester: Campaign Ad Project
  – student-produced television ad on one of the California state propositions in the upcoming election
• Second Semester: Inferno Mosaic Retelling Project
  – student art, inspired by Dante’s Inferno and theatrically presented

Texts

Students will be reading both fiction and non-fiction. The list below is illustrative and not definitive:

• Inferno by Dante
• Crime and Punishment by Fydor Dostoyevsky
• Hamlet by Shakespeare
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• The Stranger by Albert Camus

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Invisible Hand by R. C. Sproul
• The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

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Posted by Justin Wells : 08/24/2008