BOSTON — Harvard University announced on Wednesday its biggest curriculum overhaul in three decades, putting new emphasis on sensitive religious and cultural issues, the sciences and overcoming U.S. ‘parochialism.’ The curriculum at the oldest U.S. university has been criticized as focusing too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues, or for being antagonistic to organized religion. Efforts to revise it have been in the works for three years. One of the eight new required subject areas — ‘societies of the world’ — aims to help students overcome U.S. ‘parochialism’ by ‘acquainting them with the values, customs and institutions that differ from their own,’ said a 34-page Harvard report on the changes. An earlier proposal would have made Harvard unique among its elite Ivy League peers by requiring undergraduates to study religion as a distinct subject, but that was dropped in December. The changes to the general-education requirements, imposed on students outside their major, still address religious beliefs and practices. Study of those issues, however, would be folded into a broader subject of ‘culture and belief.’ The ‘culture and belief’ requirement will ‘introduce students to ideas, art and religion in the context of the social, […]