All students at King’s College, regardless of their individual majors, participate in the Core Curriculum, a set of courses and experiences designed to help students develop the intellectual maturity and moral strength to lead purposeful, meaningful lives. As the name suggests, the Core is central to a King’s liberal arts education in the Catholic tradition.
The Core Curriculum has two basic aims: foundational, in service of students’ majors and professional programs; and formative, in service of students’ lives more broadly, beyond any one discipline or any one profession. As an integrated curriculum, the Core is an expression of the College’s shared mission to be a community of learning, mindful of life’s great questions of meaning and purpose.
Concretely, the Core helps students develop foundational skills and competencies that majors and professional programs build upon. These include written and oral communication, quantitative reasoning, critical inquiry and analysis, technological competency, and information literacy.
The Core also fosters in our students intellectual virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, creativity, perseverance, and independent thinking. Ideally, our graduates consequently demonstrate tolerance for ambiguity and diversity of opinion and thought. They solve problems imaginatively, engage and learn from perspectives and experiences different from their own, and are confident in what they know while recognizing that they always have much to learn.
Finally, the Core creates opportunities for students’ cultural, moral, and spiritual formation. Here the Core most clearly reflects King’s distinctive mission as a Holy Cross college. King’s aims to graduate students who are versed in the Catholic intellectual and social justice traditions; who are proficient in recognizing, formulating, and addressing matters of moral significance and concern; who are sensitive to the scope and complexity of human experience, emotion, and expression; who have contemplated the findings and studied the methods of the natural and social sciences; and who are prepared and disposed to mobilize their talents and skills as global citizens in service of the common good.