General education – may I ask what the point is?
In my short lifetime, I have taken gen ed classes. I enjoyed them, for the most part. But, if I were to go to college, would I particularly like to spend two of my four years studying requirements that 85% of the time have absolutely no relevancy to my chosen major? Not really.
However, colleges, and many people who attend them, seem to consider gen eds worthwhile, correct? Why is this, I wonder?
Some of the justifications I hear most often:
1. Gen eds prepare you for the upper-level courses in your chosen major
2. Gen eds help you figure out what you might like to major in
3. Gen eds give you a well-rounded education by exposing you to subjects you might not have had an opportunity to learn about otherwise
I would like to take this blog entry to question these beliefs which are strongly held by a great number of people. And if, at the end of this entry, you have any more thoughts on Gen eds, please let me know what they are; and I would love to do a second post addressing these things.
Gen eds prepare you for the upper-level courses in your chosen major.
I can see one big flaw in this argument – shouldn’t the skills for your chosen major be known already at the beginning of college? Why must essential things like writing a paper or doing math be re-learned or learned at this great and elite “college level”, when the average person already spent 12 years and the majority of every day in an institution where such “special skills” could and should have already been taught?
(And, if a person was homeschooled: I do believe , if college was in the agenda, that person is equally capable of learning the skills necessary for writing a college paper and/or doing college math on their own, or with the guidance of outside classes.)
Gen eds help you figure out what you might like to major in.
Surely there is nothing wrong with this, right? Well…
This goes back to something I’ve said a number of times: why would a person go to college if he or she does not know what you want to major in? What is the point? They are doing nobody a favor by spending tons of their money (well, except those who receive the money, of course) while aimlessly meandering about the schoolwork, head down, not having enough time to even think about what they want out of life.
Need anything else be said on that?
Gen eds give you a well-rounded education by exposing you to subjects you might not have had an opportunity to learn about otherwise.
And why not?
For one, the most obvious cause – being stuck in college for four years. I apologize if I offend anyone with my frankness.
I would just like to ask: how does anybody know that a person would not be exposed or be self-motivated to study new and different subjects in-depth? I simply feel like this is a weak argument for gen ed. Life is full of inspiration for new interests, and tools and opportunities to pursue those interests. That is what is the primary function of an autodidact, and (I hope) of adults as they go through their normal lives… “real life.”
Being inspired and pursuing inspiration made up my “schooling” as a homeschooler. I really needed no such general education in order to broaden my horizons; in fact, now I get a little frustrated occasionally, as I feel my horizons are a little too broad at this point in my life!
Here are a few examples:
1. I was inspired to write because of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She wrote the Little House books, incase anybody was a little clueless about that. 
I wanted to be her – I wanted to write, and tell stories, and also have a record of my life that someone would find after I died and turn into a book series and a television show starring Melissa Gilbert. I’ve been writing ever since I was able to form words on the paper, and in my teenage years I have conducted numerous studies of writing and still continue to write (hence, largely, this blog).
2. I was inspired by coming across the television show “The Dog Whisperer” at one point, seeing how Cesar Millan formed a pack of dogs using his knowledge of the origins of canine behavior. At first I was just interested in dogs, but that branched off into a very large obsession with wolves. I have now read extensively about them, and have two internships planned for the near future at a couple of fantastic wolf refuges.
3. Probably the biggest jump I made from the point of being inspired till the peak of intense study is exercise science. It all started while watching the Winter Olympics in February 2006. Developing a slight crush on figure skater Johnny Weir, I watched all his events; and, after the Olympics, started to watch figure skating more. There were little blips on the skaters during these events, in which they often talked about the training and cross training they put into their sports. I had just started swimming a few months before, and I had a brainstorm that I could cross train myself to become a better swimmer. This grew into watching Fit TV very frequently, along with getting many exercise science, workout, nutrition, etc., books from the library. While I don’t study it as intensely as I did at that certain point of my life, the knowledge continues to carry over into whatever I am doing, and I have not completely ruled out becoming a personal trainer one of these days.
And those are just a few examples from my own short life so far.
Perhaps now I have you asking, “what IS the point of Gen eds?” along with me.
But, if I don’t, please tell me: why are Gen eds important? What purpose, in the long run, do they hold? Wouldn’t you rather have the extra time to “study” other interests on your own than be forced to take two years full of certain types of classes, taught in a certain kind of way? Why can’t I just go to a university, concentrate on my major, and come out with a piece of paper for that?
As a college student, I definitely understand the frustration with gen ed classes. While I see your point that people should spend time broadening their horizons on their own, most people really won’t do that. In an ideal world, everyone would be as driven and curious as you are! In college, educators attempt to take those students who aren’t very self-motivated and give them a little bit of perspective on their chosen major. For example, I am a chemistry major. If all I was taught was practical applications of chemistry, and never had to take a history class, I might not come out of college with much well-roundedness. I certainly know a lot of classmates who could benefit from having a more varied scope of experiences.
First, I want to say good job on a great website. If it was one of your dreams, your goals, to webmaster your own site, you are doing a lovely job.
I actually read this post last night and was chomping at the bit to respond. Thankfully, I slept first, so perhaps I will be able to make more sense.
I am going to make the case for Gen Ed’s, but as with many things, my opinions are formed around my own experiences, and there are four key things that I think help me form this opinion in particular.
[1] I attend a university on a full-ride scholarship. I do not have to pay for school. If I did, I would probably feel much differently. In any case, where I attend, you do not pay for courses invidvidually. You pay the semester fee — whatever it might be — it is standardized for all undergrads — and then you take whatever. The exception is summer courses, where the prices can very significantly, and you are allowed 2 at most.
[2] I attend a university where your Gen Ed requirements were not satisfied by a certain class (with the exception of a Intro to College Writing class — known as Writing 20 — and there are about 50 of those to choose from) but by certain areas. Example: 2 natural sciences, 2 courses with research components, 2 seminars, 2 civilizations, 2 ALPs (arts, literature, and performance), etc. etc. and many courses would fill multiple requirements. If I were required to take, say, Science 101: Biology of Humans, and that I HAD to that THAT class, I would feel stifled. In fact, one of the reasons I chose to go where I do was because I wouldn’t be forced to take a particular class (well, that and the money!)
[3] I come from a very low socioeconomic class; in fact, I received my scholarship precisely because I was below the university’s threshold for who would have to take student loans to cover their tuition and who would not. If your family’s income was below 60K, you were guaranteed a full ride with no student loans.
[4] I consider myself a writer. I take in everything around me, play with it in my head, and give it back to people in some entertaining manner.
I am going to assume that your talk about Gen Ed’s makes one or both of the assumptions I listed above: that your audience is paying for all or part of their classes and/or they are forced to take very specific classes. So we can see right off the bat that not all Gen Ed’s are the same.
I should mention now that yes, I do go to college, but I have still not figured out if it is right for me. I have figured out that it certainly isn’t for everyone, and that in many ways, the Uncollege movement is far preferable. Autodidactic learning is an incredible thing I think the mainstream has ignored for far too long. There is much to be learned from these movements and those who have taken part in them. I am not a proponent of the university/college system. It is riddled with tuition inflation, often grade inflation, and many schools are run like buisness-model machine. It sucks. Really.
So now I am going to tackle your 3 points here. While I will speak from my personal experience, I will try to expand my reply to the audience I presume you speak to.
1. Gen eds prepare you for the upper-level courses in your chosen major.
The major argument is this: I can see one big flaw in this argument – shouldn’t the skills for your chosen major be known already at the beginning of college?
The short answer is no. For this, I am going to pull #3 of my own experiences. As someone who went through many (poor) public schools — some 15 in all — I missed out on major fundamentals. For instance, though I “passed” math all the way to pre-calculus, I cannot to this day successfully pass an Algebra II exam. This is but one example. Colleges cannot assume that all of their students come in on equal footing. They often do anyway, but it is a folly.
Okay, so what if math isn’t an integral part of your major? Good point. That’s why I never exactly bothered to learn it and have since wanted to kick my own butt. But how about something that is agreed to be more universal? Writing. Not creative writing, just writing to effectively communicate. Even though I went through the dreaded public school system in very bad places, besides being shuffled in and out of them constantly, I have very good writing skills. Not everyone does. I have peers who had similar experiences I do who are mathematically incline and have excelled in their schools’ math programs. But they have a hard time getting through essays. They passed bare minimum in their school and made it to college without really learning those skills.
A college writing class is recognized as very important across the board, no matter where you go. Students have to be brought up to speed in this respect. Yes, you’d be right in saying that one semester isn’t going to drastically improve someone who has very poor skills, and that sadly is the failure of our current K-12 free education system. But students who have trouble are routinely identified in these classes and offered extra help and resources in the coming years.
In a nutshell, not everyone has been spending 12 years learning these skills. They have managed to skate by while focusing on the things they love/can do well and ended up missing out on some very important skills.
You also have to consider what you’re in college for. The Uncollege movement is largely founded around the notion that you can avoid school altogether unless multiple levels of schooling are needed for very specific trained jobs — doctors, lawyers even, engineers, etc. It can certainly be argued that any of these could be accomplished, at least at the undergrad level, without formal schooling if the student is willing to apply themselves. I’m sure someone’s done it. But I wager it is VERY difficult.
What we are calling Gen Ed requirements may very well tally up to be program requirements for these fields in schools that offer pre-med, pre-law, pre-business, etc. and if you are not up on your writing, mathematic, basic science, etc. you are at a major disadvantage. Does that mean you should quit the field? No. It means you should try harder and make the most out of the choices given to you.
2. Gen eds help you figure out what you might like to major in.
The major argument here is:
why would a person go to college if he or she does not know what you want to major in? What is the point?
You’re right. It does seem pointless to go into school not knowing what to major in. That is one of the reasons the gap year is becoming so popular: to “figure yourself out”.
But what about the people who go in with a firm idea of what they want to do? I’ll recite an anecdote here.
Coming out of senior year of HS, where I had managed to receive a sccholarship to attend an arts college and take this awesome class called American Diplomacy, I had a plan. In fact, nothing at the school I was attending really had what I wanted, so I drew up (way ahead of time) a plan for Program II, where you can design your own major based around some concrete interest and concept with the idea of how it would contribute. I wanted to do International Relations in an immersive way, and I was quite frustrated with the idea that I would have to sift through all these other requirements like natural science when I had the history, culture, language, and politics of this particular region down (Arabic and the Middle East, btw. At this school I had met my best friend, a Pakastani girl from Kuwait.)
When I arrived at school, I found that this place in particular produced one of several types of people: law, medical, business, and investment banking. I was outside the norm in the path I wanted to take, but I was like most others in the plan I had.
I took my first IR course that fall semester, along with Arabic. I LOVED it. I HATED the people and I realized quickly that I simply did not have the temperment to be a diplomat. Well, crap. Now, #1 of my listed points is important here; if I were forced to pay my way class by class, I would have taken then next semester off and spent time thinking about what I was doing so I wasn’t wasting time. However, instead, I said “what the hell.”
I am not alone. One of my very good friends was accepted into the engineering program. She switched to be a biology major dealing with evolutionary studies, and now she is pursuing research pharmaceuticals. Another friend, who was dead set on becoming a doctor (primarly because her family wanted her to be one) decided it wasn’t for her. She is now pursing her passion of music.
Gen Ed’s DO help us come to these conclusions. We take classes that we are forced to, to some degree, and we find that when our initial idea isn’t what we expected, we can follow our newfound joys into a career. In the case of the music girl, she had always loved music, so perhaps it doesn’t quite apply, but you get the general drift. Could these conclusions happen without forced Gen Ed classes? Possibly. But the wonderful thing is how it happens almost by accident.
After giving up my political science dreams, the next semester I took a history class (I was always quite fond of history) titled “Genocides of the Twentieth Century). I fell in love, once again. In fact, I now had this plan to work directly with cases of genocide and humanitarian crises, on both the forensic and archeological fronts. That REALLY made me an oddball. Sadly, because my math and science skills were so lacking, and my university didn’t offer remedial classes, and local college classes were too expensive for me to afford, I eventually had to abandon this dream. I would be competing with other grad school applicants down the line who had far more experience than me, and they would have the science/math backgrounds.
I followed this dream for two years, had plans even to work around it. Eventually, I gave it up for lost. So, what was I doing in my spare time? Well, I have a million interests. I filled all by my math Gen Ed requirements quite on accident as I pursued random things I thought were cool! I took classes titled “Cyborg Anthropology” , “Science Fiction Literature”, a full year of Polish (there were only three of us students!), a class on oceanography because Meteorology is one of my deepest loves, botany because I wanted to learn the various uses of plants. I enrolled in a program titled “Immersive Virtual Worlds” and worked with professors who were designing new online open source virtual worlds that I believe have the power to change how we do the Internet in the near future. On top of this, I revisited my creative writing past and took creative writing courses. I declared a history major and then promptly took a year to study abroad (with my school) in Germany which had absolutely no history classes. Now, I ended up returning before that year was done for other reasons, but when I returned for the spring semester (this past one — Junior year now) I received some heartfelt encouragement from a writing professor, and I changed my major — yet again — to English. Sure, I was 7 courses in the hole with it comes to having those requirements filled, but you know what I had done? I had looked at all sorts of things that interested me, which, if those broad Gen Eds were not required, I may never have done. #4 of my points is important here: as a writer, all of these things have informed the way I look at the world. I could have studied all of this on my own outside of school. But really, who thinks of Cyborg Anthropology?
Now this blends into #3 of your points:
Gen eds give you a well-rounded education by exposing you to subjects you might not have had an opportunity to learn about otherwise.
Which you elaborate with:
And why not?
For one, the most obvious cause – being stuck in college for four years. I apologize if I offend anyone with my frankness.
Not entirely true. There are fields out there that can only be taught by experts, and unless you have all the resources, you may not be able to reach out to those experts. TED is a good way, but it is not entirely inclusive, and they certainly don’t teach in the sense we think about it.
Unless you live in a very environmentall rich area, you are not going to have physical access to these experts. You can reach out by email, but many, especially in the research field, are busy. You can ask to intern, but there are many students who are already doing so. You can read as many books as you want, but it is different from learning at the hands of someone who has been there and can give you the guidance to get there yourself.
Yes, many of the topics I have explored in my three years could have been done by myself. But there is one critical factor I would have missed out on: my peers. Classes are made not only by the material learned, the professor, or whatever but by the way students interact with each other, sound ideas, come together for projects, teach each other little bits of what they are good at. This exists to some extent online in forums and whatnot, but it is not the same. And for the physical get-togethers, like Blake’s Asheville and the Hackademic camps, or the Open Master’s program, they cost money. Again, if I were paying for college, that would be one thing, but I am not. So even though I feel stifled by the system (and believe me, I have stuck it to them by taking all of these seemingly unconnected classes that have given me great joy; it is priceless to watch my dean’s face when he looks at my transcript and say — well. This is certainly not like most people I see in here. ) I am grateful for the opportunities that Gen Ed’s have provided me. Otherswise, I would not have been given the chance to have my perspective changed and yes, my horizons broadened.
In the end, I have huge horizons. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, and I’m a senior. I took a gap year now to try and figure that out, but I am still fairly clueless. I am so intensely interested in the Uncollege movement and autodidactic learning that I have been trying to incorporate it into my college experience. And again, I can only give you my opinions based of my experiences. I may otherwise have a very resounding agreement with all of your points, especially if I had stuck to the path I was certain I’d follow as a freshman.
Gen Ed’s don’t prepare you for your major courses, not necessarily, but they can prepare you for other parts of your life. If you take them because you’re interested and not because they’re easy, you’ll find hidden avenues within. I have more success growing plants, finding edible parts of them to spice my food, and extracting certain oils now than I did before. My oceanography class ended up informing the climatology paper I wrote for my history major capstone, before I switched. I still look at things around me with the perspectives my Cyborg Anthropology gave me — and have written a few great stories too. In fact, during my Russian literature class, I opted for a creative project as a final and rewrote Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospekt” as “Google Avenue” in the far future, with ideas given to my by CA the year before. And Germany? A whirlwind experience, but I have grown in my cultural awareness in a way I never have before. Being from very limited income, that was one thing I could never have replaced.
So now that I have written you a story, I hope that it helps to inform you as well.