Harvard University is once again re-thinking its basic curriculum for undergraduates (via PZ). This matters, of course, since Harvard is unanimously recognized as the World’s Greatest University (or at least that’s what they told me when I was there). Opinions differ, as you might expect, about what should be the basic course of study we expect to be mastered by every student obtaining a bachelor’s degree at an accredited college or university. At a place like St. John’s College, every student takes exactly the same classes — and every professor is expected to teach every class, from Physics to Classics. At the other end of the spectrum, some places basically allow students to choose their own course of study, without any specifically required courses.
Most academics feel that what they went through as a student is right for everyone, and in this case I’m no exception. I went to a upright Catholic institution, where the required core curriculum was substantially lengthier than anything you’ll come across in the Ivy League. There were requirements in all the canonical disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences, with some degree of flexibility within each category. I think it’s a good system; undergraduates don’t necessarily know best about what they might like to learn (who does?), and sometimes even things that you don’t enjoy might be good for you.
So here is the curriculum I would insist on if I were the Emperor of Learning. The courses every college undergraduate should take:
- Two semesters of English Literature. (No specific writing requirement, but writing would be emphasized in many of the courses across the board.)
- Three semesters of History, at least one of American history and one of non-American history.
- Some degree of proficiency in a foreign language, as measured by some standardized test.
- Two semesters of Philosophy or Religious Studies.
- Three semesters of Social Sciences, at least one but not all to be in Economics.
- Two semesters of Mathematics, either a year of Calculus or one semester each of Statistics and Algebra/Geometery at a fairly high level.
- Two semesters of Physical Science — Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.
- Two semesters of Biological Science.
- One semester of Fine Arts.
(At Villanova there was no fine arts requirement, and only one year of science was required. But we had to take three semesters of Philosophy and three semesters of Religious Studies.) I don’t think I would require any non-English literature, as reading in translation is fun but not necessarily central. I also wouldn’t require any lab component to the science courses, which I’m sure will cause howls of outrage. I believe firmly in the importance of experiment and that the scientific method is grounded in empirical exploration etc. etc. But I also know from experience that every lab course that I either took myself or served as a TA for, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. They served mostly to turn students off of science forever. Maybe I have simply been unlucky, but lab courses would require some deep re-thinking before I would include them in the required curriculum.
Let’s see, four years of college, two semesters per year, four courses per semester means that a student will take at least 32 courses as an undergraduate (they are welcome to take more courses per semester, of course). The above list comes to 17 courses, at least if they’re lucky enough to test out of the language requirement. Imagine that a typical major (or “concentration,” as they say at the WGU) insists on 10 courses in that discipline; but any given discipline will probably cover two semesters worth of the above requirements, so really only 8 more required courses. That gives a total of 25 required courses, leaving 7 completely free electives. They could be taken within the student’s major, or anywhere else. So everyone gets one course almost every semester just to have fun. (Double majors would likely require students to take extra courses; worse things could happen.)
While I think it’s good to demand that students take a long list of breadth requirements, I would be extremely flexible when it came to the required courses for a major. If I were in charge, every student could design their own major by proposing a program of study of 10 or more courses that somehow hung together to form a sensible story, even if it didn’t fit comfortably within any of the existing academic departments. So you could major in biological physics, or philosophical psychology, or the history of ideas, or German studies, or what have you. A standing committee of the University would judge all such proposals for coherence and rigor, and the successful student would be awarded a B.A. or B.S. in whatever they called their made-up program. (None of this is exactly original, to be sure.)
Different strokes for different folks, of course. Even if I were Emperor, I wouldn’t want the same set of requirements to hold at every university; a great strength of our decentralized system of higher education is that individual schools can serve as laboratories for innovation, which is a feature rather than a bug. At Caltech every undergraduate is required to take a year of calculus-based physics, for example; that probably wouldn’t work for everybody. (They also don’t admit people as English majors, although you’re allowed to switch into “Humanities” if you make that choice once you are here. Not sure what social pressures such people must feel.) But I still believe in the ideal of a broadly-based education in the liberal arts and sciences, where everyone who graduates from college knows something about the theory of evolution, the history of the Roman Empire, the law of supply and demand, and the categorical imperative. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
The most useful learning experience I had as an undergraduate was an interdisciplinary independent study project where I analyzed the poetry of Blake and Yeats and lyrics of Jimi Hendrix against a Jungian psycholgical backdrop, incorporating mythological and alchemical symbols as a common language.
But hey it was the 1970s.
😉
Elliot
I am way in the minority here, I realize, but maybe can offer a different perspective? I went to a lousy high school. I went to wonderful elementary and middle schools, however, and if not for them, I’d never have made it in college.
I had to spend two years in community college to catch up. The community college system is amazing, and makes it possible for people to catch up from crap high school so they can transfer into four year systems. Fortunately, since I was in the Boston area, my professors also taught at Harvard, BU, BC…so I was getting the same sort of education people paid 8 times as much to get.
So when I transferred into a four year, I was able to compete.
Another non-American here. I firmly believe in well-rounded education–and that one ought to have it by the time one graduates high school. The point of higher education ought to be specialization, mastering specific set(s) of skills. As far as the problems of American education go, I agree with people who suggested concentrating on the pre-university stage. I received my graduate education in the States and can testify to the absurd time-wasting imposed by coursework aiming to educate people with B.Sc. degrees who somehow didn’t take enough science during their undergrad studies and/or high school.
And just a passing note on the idea of avoiding reading in translation. As wonderful as English literature is, limiting oneself to it would create the antithesis of a well-rounded person: an ignorant, self-complacent, narrow-minded provincial.
Har. . . vard? Where’s that?
Yes, I was course 8 at MIT. The worst two things about it were (a) the sophomore-year physics classes and (b) the humanities requirement. I’m not an insular science geek; in fact, I am enough of a wild-haired, cackling Mad Humanist that I almost got out with a literature minor. (The only thing which stopped me was a Brazil-esque bureaucratic oddity and my disinclination to fight the whole thing through during my very last term.) The problem with the “HASS” (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) requirement is that it is too complicated for a human brain to understand, and the detailed boundaries the student must follow frustrate almost all attempts to find classes of actual interest. The joy of learning dies under a hail of acronyms, amid the clash of conflicting schedules.
As for the sophomore classes within course 8 itself. . . . We had an entire semester of special relativity. Before my time, I hear, it was a substantial course, whose meat included Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. Supposedly, the people in charge were afraid that the physics department was losing students, so they dumbed down the second-year classes, excising “tough” material and inflating the rest with copious amounts of hot air.
It is difficult to argue that a special relativity class should spend four weeks just getting to the Lorentz transformation. The first term of quantum mechanics, 8.04, is an even more egregious waste of time, according to every physics undergrad I’ve spoken with this past five years. (Only one professor out of the half-dozen I’ve pinged actually defended that choice of curriculum, and even then the response begged the question of whether 8.04 actually achieves the stated aim of “building intuition”, etc. Student comments suggest that it doesn’t.)
Sigh.
Junior and senior years were excellent.
I agree with the people here who say that it is a waste of time to learn a foreign language at university. Foreign languages should be taught to small children, they pick it up much faster than adults.
I’ve read that when we first learn to speak as infants, the brain becomes more sentisitive to sounds that are used in the particular languages that we are learning and less sensitive to other sounds.
When Chinese children grow up they lose the ability to hear the difference between the “L” and the “R” very well. If they then have to lean English as adults, they need to mimic the sound of an “L” and and the “R” but that’s dificult if you can’t hear the difference between the two sounds. 🙂
I’m a dreamer too, but I think your curriculum is too science heavy. I don’t see why science is twice as important as english, or four times as important as fine arts.
College is a transition time in people’s life. And thus the curriculum should be designed to aid and expand one’s horizon rather than stagnate and narrow it.
While the passion for science or math can guide you to a technical school, or the passion for humanities and social sciences to a more liberal settings, students in college should be given the opportunity and encouragment to explore beyond their comfort zone. Then and only then will they emerge in four years as comfortable rather than hazed individuals.
Give them options but make them really go and explore in those four years.
Many 40-something year olds go through a hard transition time when mid-through life they realize they are unhappy with their occupation and need to transition to something new.
Well, maybe, maybe, if they had the experience of exploring and keeping their senses open for opportunities out of their comfor level throughout their career path, that trip would be easier.
I love and hate Caltech. Mostly love but the two get mixed sometimes.
Caltech is the type of place where if you don’t work one day you are screwed for the term. Not only that but if you miss an assignment you are doomed for the term to be behind. It’s a machine that runs you down for ten weeks straight. It gives you little room to breathe, unless you are brilliant and know everything already. But believe me, if you are at tech, you just don’t know everything, so you work hard, no matter how smart and arrogant you might be. Even if you hold a nobel prize you’ll work your rear end off. The message is that, there is little room for ‘exploration’. But there are ways, and the good administration figured out that they need to find a way to give students options to cool off. And thus there are colloborations with liberal arts programs in the area where you can complete a class for which Caltech would pay, you won’t necessarily see it on your transcript, but you’ll feel happy for having done some drawing, or acting on the side. Sports are a great way to chill, and Caltech has a superb program, allowing any newcomer to do anything, no matter how much they suck.
But still it would be nice to have a humanities or social science clas which does not involve numbers.
And it would be nice to read not-creepy old classics such as Robinsoe Cruso, but something fresh and new. Don’t tell me that there is no modern english literature that deserves some attention. But I confess, the classics suck. They were great for the other tmes, now they are just boring and repell me. The one reason I despise those classes. Plus if you design a decent english class, dont have a book to read a week, 500 pages worth a week. Thats way overboard. Not only we dont read it but rather find the summary online or consult friends, but you dont remember that you ever read that book. The departments need to sit down and think about time management. If i have 6 sets to turn in this week with 500 pages to read, forget it, since science is on my mind I will put my liberal education aside. Unfortunately this is what has been going at Caltech for as long as I know.
The points are good that Sean raises but when you implement them, make the people with the brush stroke, think a bit of time management or maybe take a course in it. Because profs seam to think that what students do is care about their subject exclusively. Not a chance my friend
I guess the idea is to set objectives: what should kids take away from exposure to a certain program.
The next step is to decide what kind of exposure is necessary- should the kids read all 1800 novels or just two to get the ideas of the times and techniques or whatever your objectives were. What is too little and what is too much.
Once inner-department guidelines are set.Comes the battle field.
Inter-department battles. Make classes manageable and reasonable.
Then if undergraduates want to die they will have the opportunity to choose the craziest schedules and classes. If they want to live, they can find a way too.
To keep the integrity of the program, make the easiest-way-out option challenging enough not to be such an easy way out.
Clearly everyone should have an exposure to sociology, postmodernist lit crit, and women’s studies, so that the fact that these things are utter horseshit should be a matter of direct experience. Making them compulsory will embed the lesson firmly, just as places like Villanova turn out the most formidable atheists.
If you can somehow make an engineering schedule (without 22 credit hour semesters) with all those extra courses I’d like to see how. As it stands we dont have English courses for writing, itd be too much work so there are a few more engineering writing oriented courses for 1 credit instead.
” Some degree of proficiency in a foreign language, as measured by some standardized test.
In Canada for university you take a foreign language course (french normally) in high school up to Grade 11.
Proficiency though takes a while and it could take many courses before someone is fluent especially if they didn’t get any exposure when they were young. But hey Feynmann could fake all sorts of languages why don’t we get taught that instead 😛
Damn the University of Chicago’s requirements… I took calculus (single and multivariable) in high school, but for various reasons the U of C made me take calculus all over again. And urged me into the honors class. Thus started my taking 17 math classes, none of which had any relevance at all to my physics major (because hey, this is the U of C, we can’t teach applied math).
So I ended up with an honors math degree, all because they tricked me with requirements. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t tested out of the language requirement.
As far as philosophy goes, I would only condone that if the historical background (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, etc.) were kept to a minimum. If I was interested in rubbish written hundreds of years ago I’d take a history class. We don’t teach the Ptolemaic model in first year physics…
Long time reader, first time poster here. This thread is sort of turning into “What would I change about education” poll, so I thought I would throw in my two cents. I can’t speak so much for my undergraduate career (as it is still ongoing), but I would say that if I could change something about my education it would not be the undergraduate part but the second half of the high school portion. The system of pre-requisites and class registration structure in the Chesapeake School District was so bureaucratic and solidified that I found myself unable to take classes I wanted to take, and thus was shunted in mediocre and stultifying classes.
A few examples:
I transferred out of my Honors English 9 class (in San Diego) and switched to a regular English class because of an awful teacher. I moved to Chesapeake, Virginia in the summer between my 10th and 11th grade year. At this point, I was sick of the slow, meandering pace of my regular English classes, so I went to the registrar’s office in the Chesapeake school if I could switch to the Honors English class. My registrar, looking at my transcript from San Diego, told me that I couldn’t since the Honors English 11 class requires Honors English 10 as a pre-requisite.
I then asked what was considered known material in the Honors English 11 class in the hope of maybe taking a writing test and a summer reading list. The registrar said that Honors English 11 was literally just the regular English 12 class. I asked if I could take the regular English 11 class or the Honors English 10 class over the summer, but summer school was only an available option to remedial students, not to one who had my B+/A- average. I slumped back in my seat, clearly outclassed in more ways than one.
Not only this, but the graduation requirements from San Diego did not fulfill the requirements of Chesapeake school district, mainly because of the difference in class length and because Virginia required standarized test scores in several basic courses. This meant that not only was I stuck in a regular English course that was merely the Honors English course minus one year, but I couldn’t even take the AP classes or the electives that I wanted because I had to retake the remedial science and history courses that I had already passed in San Diego! I was starting to think that the fact that the standarized test were officially called SOLs was not merely a coincidence.
The whole experience left me extremely bitter about the latter half of my high school education. It was an experience in sharp contrast to the relative ease with which you could achieve pre-requisites and graduation requirements in San Diego. In San Diego you could take regular courses in summer school without being a remedial student. This was a measure developed to relieve overcrowding and waiting lists in the regular courses. In Virginia–which, by the way, is 47th in terms of per student education spending–there weren’t enough summer school teachers to warrant summer school being anything more than a remedial last resort.
Woo, tangent. Anyway, the thing I would change about education if I could? Flexibility of course. Flexibility of the faculty, flexibility of requirements cross-state, flexibility when a student wants to move upward, etc. Unfortunately, what does flexibility require? Money.
Charon, but couldn’t you just do the exams without following classes? That’s what I did in similar cases.
I was hoping that someone would have brought this up already along the way, but it seems that it is a task left for me to undertake. Any reform of university curricula must look at some profound philosophical questions before simply mandating this or that set of required courses. Foremost among these questions is the role of the university in the society/nation as a whole. Most universities, including private ones, receive substantial funding from public sources (grants, research, tuition loans, etc. et al), and thus have some responsibility to the civil commons for their use of those funds.
Universities are elitist in nature, if for no other reason than there are only so many enrollment slots alloted each year to incoming freshman and graduate students, but also through the selection criteria (and processes) established to make the admission choices. Currently only 19% of high school graduating seniors will matriculate through a successful, four-year, university/college bachelor’s degree program (that percent peaked at 27% in the early 70’s). Yet, we focus our k-12 public education programs to provide 100% of those students with the requisite skills and achievement test scores to attend universities and colleges. What is happening to that missing 80%? What is happening in the 6-12 curricula that pre-selects for that 19%? What?? What?? What?? Yes there are many of these sorts of questions.
Perhaps some of the responses can be addressed through questions and examinations of our teacher (and professor) preparation programs. I noticed that no one above mentioned that, yet all were educated in programs, k-12 and universities, by teachers and professors who had necessarily matriculated through undergraduate and graduate curricula. When we, as a nation, predetermine that all students in the country will be taught by those who are successful in: gaining entrance to a four-year university/college; maintaing their scholastic standing and graduating; being admitted into teacher preparation and/or other graduate studies; maintaining the quality of their work and being awarded certifications, credentials, graduate degrees; finally entering the teaching profession whether public k-12, community college, or university/college—-well we certainly have demanded that we provide the very best university curricula we can create. Callous disregard for Plato is not the hallmark of an enlightened educator.
Lola Walser said:
Another non-American here. I firmly believe in well-rounded education—and that one ought to have it by the time one graduates high school. The point of higher education ought to be specialization, mastering specific set(s) of skills. As far as the problems of American education go, I agree with people who suggested concentrating on the pre-university stage. I received my graduate education in the States and can testify to the absurd time-wasting imposed by coursework aiming to educate people with B.Sc. degrees who somehow didn’t take enough science during their undergrad studies and/or high school.
Leaving aside the fact that there are problems with high school (and earlier) education, there’s also a difference in philosophy: at what age should people be choosing what to specialize in? 20? 18? 14? The European system is generally geared towards the earlier ages, so that in the later years of high school (or the equivalent) you’re already starting to specialize, and you’re expected to know exactly what subject you’re going to do at university.
The American system allows for the possibilty that not all 18-year-olds will know what they want to specialize in, and so it’s relatively easy to change majors, sometimes even in your third year (depending on the university). I’ve known enough people who did things like that to think it’s a valuable approach. And I’ve known a few British people, for example, who had a rough time in university because they realized they really didn’t like what they’d picked as their major, but found it very difficult to switch to something else.
I’m biased, of course — I entered university not knowing whether I wanted to do biology or astronomy, and was able to make a more informed choice after having the opportunity to take courses in each. So the system worked well for me. And it ended up letting me major in medieval history at the same time, which was a bonus.
(I assume you’re not suggesting that the entire US undergraduate educational system should be re-arranged just to avoid inconveniencing those foreign grad students who feel bored by their coursework? 😉
A separate issue is this: when you’re at university, you have potential access to significantly better, deeper, and more sophisticated study about all those things you’re not majoring in. So if a well-rounded education is a good thing, why not take advantage of it?
And just a passing note on the idea of avoiding reading in translation. As wonderful as English literature is, limiting oneself to it would create the antithesis of a well-rounded person: an ignorant, self-complacent, narrow-minded provincial.
I certainly agree with you here. I’m not sure why Sean seems to have an animus against reading literature in translation; for what it’s worth, “English” classes in American elementary and high schools almost always include some literature in translation. Off the top of my head, I can remember reading Beowulf, The Odyssey, Sophocles, and Tolstoy, all in high school. Oh, and parts of the Bible. (Yes, that’s literature in translation, too.)
Some of the best small liberal arts colleges in the U.S. are just that- small liberal arts colleges. Confusing a school like Reed or St. Johns with a major landgrant university will lead to…confusion.
Frankly, if you want the strength of a specialized major from a large school, and any degree of comprehension of the humanities, you need to spend more than four years in post-secondary education. The departments fill the last three years of the undergrad with required courses, and their first year is spent taking prerequisites.
In all probability, most of our post-secondary educational system is composed of ‘too big to fail’ entities who haven’t considered for years, if ever, the broader role they play in educating the nation. All things considered, maybe best to leave ‘well enough’ alone.
And another foreigner… I also had basically math courses only at university in Germany (some physics for a very minor minor). And since we all think however we did it is best, I agree with Lola and the guy from Melbourne.
One reason is my impression as instructor that the students can’t concentrate on anything and so don’t learn any of the stuff they do very well. The other is that university students are grown-ups, and should be treated as such. In the US, even graduate students are treated like children the first year or so. Why not trust students? Most people have wide interests, no need to force it on them.
If you insist on GenEd requirements, then certainly Calculus should not be part of it. Never understood why a historian should know it. If any math, give a numeracy course so people can make informed judgements about numerical stuff (eg, statistics) they are likely to come across.
christian h said:
“In the US, even graduate students are treated like children the first year or so.”
Oh how true, even if you are in your nth year as a grad student, where n is a large number. In my program, and I suspect many others, a lot of students enter after having worked a few years. So we’re older when we enter, and we reach our upper twenties and lower thirties while still in grad school. And they (our professors, department administrators) *still* treat us like children, doing everything from herding us into a lecture room just to provide warm bodies for a boring lecture to lecturing us about how to spend our time. By the way, “they” is the MIT biology department.
So, given the reality of the current higher ed system, how should a bright high school senior (scores and grades hi enough to get into virtually any school) with a breadth of interests (physics is usually number 1 but depending on the day biophysics, neuroscience, MD/PhD to even pin stripes and making a lot of money on some) pick a school/program?
How much does the undergrad school matter, assuming strong undergrad performance, in grad physics opportunities? Elite private, say Stanford , vs. Ivy, say Harvard vs. strong state, say Stanford vs. U Michigan or U Washington vs. the strong technical, say Caltech, vs. podunk U.
At what point does the strength of the previous program matter in determining future opportunities for the steps from undergrad to grad MS PhD to post-doc to faculty position? Or does individual performance always trump the program?
To the query above, I should have added the selection of advisor/mentor to the list of the relative importance of what matters for the next step.
I encountered a Phd from a top tier school who couldn’t have bought a post-doc if he had paid for the whole thing. He and his advisor had stacked the deck in selecting his Phd committee so badly that he got off with one that wasn’t worth much more than the paper it was printed on and the department had let them get away with it.
My oh my, Sean has stirred up a storm. It appears to me that the European
(I was educated in the English system) and the American systems have very
different assumptions underlying them, and serve different purposes. At least
in my day (cue Monty Python sketch), secondary education gave one sufficient
depth in a wide range of subjects to make an educated choice about what to study at university. But, such a choice did not entrain you into a specific
vocational path. It would be interesting to see statistics related to choices of
major and profession 5, 10 and 20 years after graduation, in Europe and the US.
To my mind, secondary education in the US is, in general, an unmitigated
disaster. I would also have to agree with the individual who argued that
general education requirements at universities only serve to provide a
veneer of knowledge and understanding. I work in an interdisciplinary
field (oceanography) in the US. Whilst generalizing a tad, most students entering
graduate school to study physical oceanography wouldn’t know a bacterium
from a virus, and most entering for a PhD in biological oceanography
couldn’t solve (dy/dt = -ky) if their lives depended on it. I admit that my
sample size is small and selective, but it would lend one to suspect the
success of general education requirements, at least in the sciences.
As for what I would impose if everyone was unfortunate enough to have me
in charge; I don’t know. One failure of education systems in general is that
they are full of well meaning people with grand plans, but few of these plans
are ever followed to completion and fewer still are analyzed to discover objectively what works and what does not – in large part because for a plan
to be successfully examined it has to be followed for many years, and others
will change the plan before there are sufficient data to really get ones teeth into.
So the upshot is we have to muddle through as best we can. Given that,
I do agree with Sean and others, that one full semester of special
relativity is excessive. Now, if one were talking about a semester of
fluid mechanics, that would be a different thing altogether – I know
several folks working in classical general relativity who would argue that
a throrough study of fluid mechanics is very helpful in that field as well.
Adrian
Your ideal course schedule sounds similar to Loyola University Chicago’s core (at least when I was there; they’ve recently changed it), which was, if memory serves:
3 Philosophy Courses
3 Theology Courses
3 Literature Courses
2 English Comp. courses
2 History Courses
2 Social Science Courses
1 Fine Arts
3 Science Courses, with at least one physical science course and one life science course
1 (or two, I placed into Multi Variable Calc, so I have no idea) math/stat courses
2 Foriegn Language courses, or proficiency which could come from Highschool.
I think the only real changes involved requiring 5 total phil/theo instead of 6, with a mandatory course having to deal with ethics or morality (or something), and they’ve changed the math requirement to be any course having a quantitative componant. At least I think that’s what they did. I was able to double major in Math and Physics, but only got out in four years without taking summer school because I had entered with around a year of AP credit.
Personally, I wish I would have stayed longer and picked up a comparative lit minor or an English lit major, but I’ve been informed on numerous occasions that I’m not too normal 🙂 . I think other people have said this in the comments, but I’ll say it anyway: I think it’s still worth having a demanding course requirment, rather than a kind of, “Do what feels right,”- type of requirement, if only to force students to think outside of their field–or possibly just to force students to think.
Greg:
Do they teach that at university? I only found one high school where they have a “Foriegn Language Department”:
Ames High School Foriegn Language Department 🙂
OK. Make fun of my spelling. And I think, strictly speaking, the courses satisfying the Foreign language requirement were taught by the Department of Modern Languages. And I don’t think there was any requirement that the language you took had to be foreign to you: in my 9 person Russian class, I think only 2 or 3 people couldn’t already speak at least some Russian.
I also don’t think they actually called it the ‘Foreign Language requirement,’ either. Eh, whatever.