IT HAPPENS every semester about this time. The Course Offering Directory becomes available online, tempting students to put their work aside and window shop for classes. As they plan their academic careers, a familiar phrase keeps popping up: "It fulfills one of my requirements."
This single phrase explains why most students have taken classes they didn't want to take that taught them very little. This system of area requirements is unproductive and detracts from the quality of the education we receive here. The University should eliminate these requirements and replace them with a standardized first-year curriculum.
The philosophy behind area requirements is that they supposedly force students to expose themselves to different disciplines and challenge them to rethink where their interests lie. This fits in with the modern liberal arts philosophy of education, which says that college should broaden horizons and stimulate interest rather than teach facts. However, area requirements don't actually accomplish this intended goal.
Many students feel about area requirements like they do about going to the dentist - they want to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. The system encourages this mentality by allowing students to pick which course they use to satisfy each requirement from a vast array of choices. The unintended effect of this design is that students pick the least demanding, least engaging class available. They want to get it over with and move on.
Some people would respond that whether or not students enjoy these classes, they are good for them to take. Required classes can be valuable even if students aren't ecstatic about taking them. But area requirements aren't the way to do this. A standardized first-year curriculum is.
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Consider for a moment the goals of education. What should higher education involve? First, it should teach students how to think critically, how to write, how to become independently capable lifelong learners. This is the liberal arts theory of education - we shouldn't value specific facts as much as abstract skills.
A liberal arts education comes from being excited about learning, engaging a subject and being challenged. No required class will ever accomplish this as well as a class that a student selects voluntarily, simply because he or she is interested in it.
Required classes can, however, serve the second main aim of education - to teach students a basic body of knowledge. A liberal arts education is great, but it presupposes that students have a firm grasp of the basics. Yes, students should learn to think and write. But they should also learn some concrete things along the way - things to think and write about.
In an ideal world, high school would take care of teaching core knowledge on a broad scale. But not all high schools teach fundamental knowledge. So if colleges should teach basic knowledge, how should they do it? Some sort of required coursework is necessary - for students' own good, even if they don't enjoy it.
Within the realm of required courses, a standardized curriculum would work better than area requirements. Students would dislike either system. But with the former, at least they would be actually learning something, instead of fulfilling area requirements with gut classes and coasting through them with the sole aim of being done with them.
Under a uniform curriculum, every first year student would take 12 standardized credit hours, plus one elective. Those 12 core hours would consist of a series of intensive courses in basic disciplines, such as English, math, science, art and history, for three or four weeks each. Students would learn the fundamentals in a challenging, engaging environment.
This would force students to acquire basic knowledge. Instead of snoozing through a semester of some obscure, narrow science class, they would learn the fundamentals of biology, chemistry and physics. Rather than coast through an easy, specialized history course on the history of some specific place at a specific time, students would get the basic, broad history of Europe, America, Africa, Latin America and Asia. And so on.
Students would then spend their remaining three years broadening their horizons in their major studies and elective courses. The first-year curriculum would provide a solid background, giving students a better idea of what they'd like to pursue in more depth. They would move on to develop more specialized knowledge and abstract skills. But at the very least, a core curriculum would ensure that students would graduate from college having actually learned something.
(Bryan Maxwell's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bmaxwell@cavalierdaily.com.)
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