The Common Curriculum is an essential part of the academic life at Yale-NUS. Courses are created to be multi-disciplinary and to drive critical, creative and active thinking. The Common Curriculum engineered at Yale-NUS includes the following:
Humans are social beings. We live in families, tribes, cities, and nations, work in organisations, and interact through networks. The ways in which we co-exist play an important role in shaping our individual patterns of feeling, thought and action. In Comparative Social Inquiry, students engage with this social world by investigating central qu...
Most Common Curriculum courses range widely across space and time. Each focuses on a particular way of understanding the world and teaches a particular set of skills: to weigh scientific evidence, to interpret imaginative literature and visual art, to understand social practices in different societies, to evaluate moral and political arguments, ...
Literature and the arts inspire wonder and offer provocation. In Literature and Humanities, students explore myth-making and storytelling from a variety of traditions to understand how poets, historians, and visual artists represented their own worlds and times. What is distinctive and visionary about these creative achievements, and why have th...
This course introduces students to foundational figures of modern social thought and explores the ways in which their writings have been used in recent social analysis and political practice in different parts of the world. Taking Ibn Khaldun’s pre-modern analysis of society as a point of departure, students immerse themselves in the complex ide...
“The unexamined life is not worth living”, said Socrates. Students in Philosophy and Political Thought will examine their lives: Is the world that we see and inhabit a product of our imaginations? Which habits of mind and action lead to the most fulfilling lives? What does justice require of us? Does history bring progress? As...
How can we convince ourselves, or other people, that an assertion is true? Students in Quantitative Reasoning will think deeply about how to address real-world problems through quantitative analysis and will consider what one may reasonably expect from such analysis. Seeking insight into different ways of representing the world in numbers and ma...
Science is often taught in school in the form of small slices of knowledge, drawn from a vast pool of ‘facts’, ‘models’, ‘principles’ and ‘theories’ that have made their way into textbooks. In reality, though, an educated person should understand science not for its vast body of extant knowledge, or its utility, but because of...