Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
New statutes prohibit general-education courses that teach “identity politics” or that are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” Moreover, they give the state’s Board of Education and Board of Governors the power to approve or reject specific general-education courses if the state deems them too “speculative” or determines that they are based on “unproven” content. These developments are concerning, as Jeremy C. Young and Amy B. Reid rightly point out in their Chronicle essay, “Florida’s Nakedly Ideological Attack on Gen Ed.” Florida’s legislative meddling has constrained professors’ ability to control their curriculum.
But might the changes have a positive impact on students? In an opposing Chronicle essay, “Professors Ruined Gen Ed. Florida Is Fixing It,” Mark Bauerlein and Scott Yenor make their own compelling argument. I am a first-year law student and a product of the “student-choice-centered” model of general education that Young and Reid champion, and which most American colleges employ. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Young and Reid propose a definition of general education that maximizes student freedom, “exposing students to a variety of disciplines” while fending off a technocratic, vocational education that merely prepares students for the work force. Yet this approach carries the risk that a student will simply avoid disciplines they deem irrelevant. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott acknowledged this risk, noting that education “begins with the appearance of a teacher with something to impart which is not immediately connected with the current wants or ‘interests’ of the learner.” In other words, educators are valuable precisely because they force students to confront uncomfortable ideas. Given the choice, most students will avoid such situations.
This avoidance is not malicious. Students are simply not equipped to assess the pedagogical value of a course before they have taken it. If you ask a first-year college student why calculus or economics or sociology is important, they almost certainly won’t have a well-developed answer. Even if the student had been exposed to the field in high school through, say, Advanced Placement courses, it’s unlikely that their answer will capture the nuance, the historical context, or the broader disciplinary importance of the subject. In lieu of an informed choice, students resort to a staggering array of different techniques to pick courses: We solicit word-of-mouth recommendations, trawl Rate My Professor for “easy A’s,” copy our friends’ selections, or select the first open class from the course catalog that fits into our schedules. This is not the rich disciplinary exploration Young and Reid envision.
My own undergraduate program reveals the system’s flaws. As a mathematics major faced with dozens of general-education options across a stunning range of subjects, I filled my schedule with economics, physics, mathematics, computer-science, and accounting classes. Humanities courses only occasionally intruded. One class in Russian — in preparation for a graduate program’s language requirement. One class on Western musical history — an easy A given my training as a violinist. One literature course — the price I paid to study abroad. I chose just a few non-numerical classes, and none of them were for academic reasons. Some further coursework in the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts was imposed upon me by my university, but even there I took painstaking efforts to find courses as closely aligned with my worldview as possible.
Faced with a buffet of academic treats, students found themselves without an appetite.
I took no philosophy, sociology, visual arts, political science, psychology, or history. And it’s not just me, either. During my master’s program, I worked as an academic adviser at a large public, land-grant institution with hundreds of general-education courses. One student, while searching through a list of courses designed to expose students to ideas of pluralism and the diversity in American society, asked me, “Which of these courses is going to be the least focused on diversity?” A computer-science major asked me to help them select a computer-science course that would satisfy a social-science requirement, and seemed shocked when informed that such a course did not exist. More common, though, was the refrain of the disillusioned: “I’m not interested in any of these courses.” Faced with a buffet of academic treats, students found themselves without an appetite.
The excessive variety in general-education courses at most institutions also undermines student learning and inquiry. A lack of common content keeps us from engaging with the material with our peers outside of the classroom. This system teaches the grammar of academic life without the vocabulary: We learn the cases and the moods, the declensions and conjugations of the disciplines, yet we lack the ability to hold a conversation. During my undergraduate years, I shared classes with very few of my friends. Accordingly, we rarely talked about classes, and the few occasions we did were dreary affairs revolving around our professors or our homework. We never discussed the contents of our courses and certainly didn’t engage in deeper philosophical debate. It’s tough to chat about, say, A Tale of Two Cities, with someone who hasn’t read it.
Compare this with my current experience as a first-year law student. With small variations from school to school, the first-year legal curriculum is standardized across the United States: torts, contracts, property, constitutional law, criminal law, civil procedure, and some form of legal-writing course. When first-year students socialize, we find ourselves able to discuss the content of our shared classes. We can tackle deeper issues relating to the different branches of the law and leave with a fuller understanding of the law in conversations that are only possible because the content is shared and standardized. Instead of comparing our piles of homework, we can debate the morality of vicarious liability — even with students taught by a different professor — or quibble with law students in another state over whether the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence favors corporate defendants in civil cases. These conversations are as conducive to learning as our time in the classroom, and they have the added benefit of helping us understand how our peers think.
Law school comes closer to Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of the “educated public” than our current system of undergraduate general education. The philosopher’s educated public satisfies three criteria. First, the group must be “tolerably large” — large enough to spread outside the private confines of one’s peers, but not so large that there is no longer a “shared social existence.” Second, the group mutually assents to the “standards by appeal to which the success or failure of any particular thesis or argument is to be judged” and that there be some consensus on the rationality and authority of those standards. Finally, the educated public requires a solid foundation in the form of shared beliefs, which MacIntyre argues, stem from reading “a common body of texts.”
The shared basis of argumentation and the central core of knowledge enable members of the group to communicate more effectively and avoid the sorts of disagreements that derail many conversations today. However, the third factor is missing in our dominant model of undergraduate general education, which precludes students from engaging with each other in meaningful ways outside of the classroom. Stifling such conversation is counterproductive.
Indeed, a carefully constructed core curriculum designed by faculty insulates students against indoctrination. Learning from a shared curriculum does not, as Young and Reid assert, entail adopting “particular shared ideas, beliefs, or understandings.” Asking students to learn the same material need not mean asking those students to mindlessly regurgitate that knowledge without critical reflection. It simply provides students with a shared language and a foundational body of knowledge off which to base their arguments.
The idea that such a system leads to indoctrination is facile. Faculty members are not engines of indoctrination, but attempted indoctrination by any one person would be hampered and disrupted by students’ ability to debate with each other outside the classroom. Controversial opinions are more readily challenged and more critically examined when every student is equipped to assess those opinions and critique them in a manner accepted by the community. Additionally, subversive ideas are notably more powerful when people understand the foundations or norms being transgressed or subverted.
Building a rich intellectual community on campus requires more than merely changing the current model of general education, but a more standardized curriculum is a meaningful start. This start, however, is being derailed. As the political theorist Rita Koganzon notes in two recent articles, since the book-banning debates of the 1970s, students have been increasingly transformed into political pawns in pedagogical debates. The pattern is consistent: Students are bestowed with positive “rights” (for instance the right to read or the right to choose their own courses), and any attempted deprivation of those “rights” becomes a travesty.
These arguments arise between two parties with legitimate educational duties. In the case of book banning, the argument was between teachers and librarians on one side and parents on the other. Students are usually dragged into the situation when one party gives up on convincing the other the good old-fashioned way. When parents, who saw themselves as their children’s moral educators, resisted certain pedagogical choices by the schools (like which books to stock in the library), the schools invoked students’ “right to read.” This lent the schools a rhetorical advantage and painted parents as censors.
A similar process is at risk of occurring in the current debate over general education. Two groups of faculty members disagree about the most pedagogically sound curriculum, and both sides invoke external authority to support their positions. The conservative professors run to the Florida Legislature for a top-down imposition of authority, while the more-liberal faculty invoke a student’s “freedom” to choose their own curriculum. Neither strategy is appropriate.
Bauerlein and Yenor claim their position is “inarguable,” while Scott and Reid assert that Bauerlein and Yenor have “lost the intellectual debate.” I contend that the question of general education is still an open one. To foreclose further conversation risks stagnation when there should be improvement, and no one benefits from that.
