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:
Human beings are social and political creatures. We live in families, tribes, cities, nations, and networks, and the way that we live together plays an important role in shaping our individual patterns of feeling, thought, and action. In Comparative Social Inquiry, students investigate central questions about society and the human condition by c...
Foundations of Science aims to develop the skills, patterns of thought, and facility with science and technology that will enable the non-science major to lead a responsible life in this century. The rapid expansion of biotechnology and medicine, the explosion of computer technologies, datasets of all kinds, and the impacts of society on the env...
No liberal arts and science education would be complete if it did not give students some experience comprehending a particular time and place different from their own. To truly understand a different context requires an assortment of skills: students must be able to interpret literature and artistic works, to evaluate historical evidence, to und...
Literature and the arts rouse the passions and provoke reflection. In this set of courses, students explore mythmaking and storytelling from a variety of traditions to understand how poets, historians, and artists represent their own worlds and times. What is distinct and visionary about these creative achievements, and why have they endured? Ho...
This course will introduce students to foundational figures of modern social thought and explore the ways in which their writings have been taken up in contemporary social analysis and political practice in different parts of the world. Students will immerse themselves in the complex ideas and systematic visions of major social thinkers such as ...
“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...
Whether you are interested in contemporary problems such as climate change or age-old puzzles such as the origin of the universe, you will find that you need to understand not merely the facts that scientists discover, but also, more fundamentally, the way that science functions as a mode of inquiry. Regardless of their level of...