General education in the liberal arts college

Liberal arts colleges have for decades prescribed a distribution of courses taken across a range of liberal arts disciplines, in order to help create the "well-educated person" with exposure to concepts and ideas that the citizenry "should" know.

When I was an undergraduate, this requirement was extremely minimal: 2 courses each in humanities; social sciences; and natural sciences. I don't recall that specific courses were listed; I think you could just take anything. Since you majored in SOMETHING, two of your major courses counted in one of the three areas, so really, the distribution requirements only amounted to four courses outside what you might ordinarily be interested in.

Harvard revised its distribution requirements in 2007. (I'm a bit late to the party, here, but this is important for me in the light of ongoing discussions at my own college about our revisions to general education.) Whereas the prior incarnation, called the Core Curriculum, was intended to introduce discipline-specific ways of thinking, the new general-education curriculum "introduces undergraduates to ways of thinking about the world that will shape their lives beyond college" (Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2009; p. 51).

I find this shift in intentions extremely interesting. The former is abstract, an intellectual exercise of sorts; the latter is applications-oriented, practical, real-world, implicitly interdisciplinary.

At my college, we have a vast GenEd system: 12 specific educational goals to be met through a menu of specific courses that meet those goals. Between the weird scheduling blocks, the four-credit system (don't even get me started!), more-specific requirements for GenEd for some majors, and other scheduling issues like field study for teaching preparation, students often have a difficult time completing these requirements, and they tend to make decisions based on what fits in their schedules rather than what courses might best for their educational programs. More fundamentally, students do not understand the purpose of GenEd, and understanding is further hindered by the way that advisers tend to talk about the program: "git yer GenEds out of the way early."

In essence, GenEd is reduced to a bunch of boxes that must be checked off on a form required for graduation. There is little explicit discussion of the REASONS for GenEd. However, if you DO look into the rationales, you find it's along the old models. For example, many of my courses meet the social sciences goal: "an understanding of the principles of behavioral and social sciences and/or institutions, together with a critical appreciation of how scientific knowledge has been constructed, including methods of validating the results of scientific inquiry in studying human behavior." Notice how this is all about epistemologies and methods that are expected to be discipline-specific, as opposed to an issue-specific or problem-specific approach.

In my view, this is one reason why GenEd doesn't resonate with students. It is framed on ways of thinking rather than on problems/issues students might face.