Studio Education is a place for students to study English Literature and Drama, but there is growing momentum within its SALA Programme towards an emphasis on the inclusion of Data Literacy within the Liberal Arts. In today’s world, sometimes defined as the Information Age, skills associated with data of all types are increasingly important to learn, develop and apply. For this reason, there has been a conscious effort to include Data Literacy in the development of new SALA courses. Anthropology & Geography with Writing, Mathematical Explorations and Scientific Explorations are three such academic offerings that incorporate student exposure to data, albeit alongside the more traditional elements of Liberal Arts courses such as reading and writing.

According to a recent Huffington Post article discussing college admissions[1], nearly 200,000 high school seniors in the United States graduate with a perfect 4.0 GPA, 3,000 students score a near-perfect 2200 on the SAT and Harvard rejects a mind boggling 200 applicants who score a perfect 2400 on the test — each year. Further, admission rates at Ivy League institutions, and at the boarding schools that serve as pipelines into these universities, have dropped precipitously over the last decade as the number of domestic and international applicants surges[2].

There is obvious large-scale moral disagreement across cultures and even within the same cultures. In many ways, moral disagreement is unique in that it almost always seems to be irreconcilable or irresolvable. What can we do when someone disagrees with us on a moral matter?

Comparative Societies and Cultures was a course born from the heart of Studio Education. So many of our founding partners and early families were involved that it is really now quite difficult to say exactly who came up with the idea. As I remember it, the evolution was something like this: