Core Curriculum

First-Year Experience

In the first year at New College, students enroll in two Immersive educational experiences: Introduction to Homer’s Odyssey and Techne. These foundational courses introduce students to the Logos/Techne curriculum and contextualize their academic journey. These shared academic experiences promote a sense of community within the student body through a collective appreciation for the wisdom of the past and a collective exploration of skills needed for the future.

General Education at New College

The General Education program at New College follows the State University system guidelines in providing a mix of core requirements that reflect both Logos (English Composition, Civics) and Techne (Mathematics, Natural Sciences). General Education electives, however, are drawn from a list of courses which exploring eternal human questions through the medium of the Great Works; we call these courses “Enduring Human Questions.”

Enduring Human Questions

These courses allow students to engage with the deepest aspects of the human experience that concern our existence, purpose, values, and understanding of the world, through the medium of the Great Works. By “Great Works” we mean those exceptional and enduring products of imagination, ingenuity, and craft whose richness and complexity provoke ever renewed questions and answers about what it means to be human. What makes life worth living? What makes it extraordinary? What do we owe to each other? To ourselves? What should be preserved, what altered? Are there right and wrong, better and worse ways to pursue and answer these questions? To live the lives that these answers promise? “Great Works” are generally familiar and foundational, often referenced, imitated, lampooned, debated, and engaged by other works, yet they continue to surprise and seduce each reader or observer who encounters them afresh. Students will have a variety of courses to choose from that engage with different works and different questions, but we expect that these courses will help students understand that answers to important human questions can be found in the careful analysis of the Great Works of literature, philosophy, religion, and art that have inspired generations of study and commentary.

The Socratic Experience

Some New College of Florida students may opt to fulfill their Core Curriculum requirements through a unique, structured general education pathway tailored to its thesis requirement. Called the Socratic Experience, this program is a specially sequenced, cohort-based approach to the Logos electives that systematically develops the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for thesis research. It explicitly draws upon the Great Books of Western Civilization for reading material and discussion, and the faculty adopt the same Socratic teaching technique across the courses.

The cohort approach and the continuity of Socratic dialogue allows students to become comfortable speaking in class and engaging the literature. The Socratic Experience features
additional benefits, such as special disputatio dinners, a welcoming ceremony, and a full
induction into the cohort at the conclusion of the second semester. Moreover, students who
complete the Socratic Experience will only need to take the two foundational courses in the Great Books program to fulfill its requirements for a secondary Area of Concentration.