UMD Liberal Education Forum

Four Models of General Education

Adapted from

Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Our Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More

By Derek Bok

2006 Princeton University Press

Chapter 10 Acquiring Broader Interests

#1 Distribution Requirements – “…Call upon students to complete a certain number of courses or credit hours in each of three major areas – the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Variations of this model also exist which create more narrowly defined categories that students must sample – for example, by dividing the sciences into biological and physical or the humanities into literature and the arts.�

Pro
1. Students gravitate to courses they find especially interesting.
2. Students have the freedom to educate themselves in the manner best suited for their intellectual makeup.
3. Students will gravitate toward classes taught by professors with a reputation of first rate teaching.

Con

1. Students seldom know in advance what courses will help them most to advance intellectually.
2. Students pick their courses for various reasons besides a desire to increase their mental powers or satisfy intellectual interests.
3. Few of the offerings from which students choose are designed for the specific purpose of furthering the goals of general education.

Summary – “…simple distribution schemes seem likely to succeed only where faculty are willing to spend considerable time advising students, where undergraduates are highly motivated to secure well-rounded education, and where special courses are provided (especially in science) that are specifically designed to awaken curiosity and create enthusiasm in young people whose principal interests lie in other areas of the curriculum. These conditions probably exist in relatively few colleges. The most likely explanation (for why the approach has survived at all) is that distribution requirements have something to offer every constituency. Students can achieve some semblance of breadth with minimal restraints on their freedom to choose from the vast array of courses in the catalogue. The faculty is not called upon to create new courses or to teach any subjects they do not wish to teach. College officials can provide a general education program without incurring any new costs.�

#2 The Great Books – “…,such a general education program will consist entirely or mainly of a study of original texts from a variety of fields….By immersing themselves in the finest books that civilization has produced, students will come to grips with fundamental questions of human existence, social organization, and the natural and physical environment. Better yet, they will explore these subjects through the works of the greatest intellects that ever lived.�

Pro

1. Increases students self knowledge, elevates their tastes, enhances their powers of reasoning, deepens their insight into recurring social issues and moral dilemmas, and builds a continuing interest in many fields of human inquiry and experience.
2. Insures that students will have studied the same substantial list of readings and grappled with the same set of fundamental questions.
3. Suh study may create a common core of learning within an increasingly diverse student body and thus provide a counterweight to the divisive tendencies of race, religion, and class.

Con
1. This model does not lend itself to large lecture classes.
2. Full time faculty members are rarely qualified or willing to teach these courses, thus leading to a large cadre of graduate students and part time instructors staffing many small sections.
3. Students could object to the “list� containing few, if any, women authors or throwing too little light on non-Western cultures. And students tend to object to heavily prescribed curricula, especially when laden with required texts of ancient vintage having little apparent connection to today’s world.

Summary – “On balance, therefore, the practical disadvantages of a full-blown great Books approach will usually outweigh the benefits. That is doubtless the reason why so few colleges have elected to take this route. A much more common prctice is to include one or two courses on the history of ideas or the development of literature utilizing a list of great texts. In this way, a college can reap some of the benefits of the Great Books approach, using subjects in which the method works to best advantage and the problems of implementation are not insuperable.�

#3 Survey Courses – “…faculties can create a battery of sweeping courses covering the growth of Western civilization, a glimpse of other major cultures and civilizations, an introduction to the great periods of Western art and music, the evolution and functioning of democratic institutions and political processes, the development of modern science, the operation of free and competitive economy, and the nature of the human mind and personality. In the hands of great lecturers, such courses offer the prospect of a panoramic view of human achievement and an impressive foundation for later experience and learning.�

Pro
1. Covers the breadth of learning.
2. Fewer courses that offer broader coverage.
3. An organized, simple sequence of classes that deliver the entire, or most of the General Education program.

Con
1. Survey courses of this kind can easily become superficial.
2. The courses can become the delivery system for imparting large quantities of facts and information, quickly learned and quickly forgotten.
3. Large numbers of small or medium size courses are difficult to staff, or large impersonal lecture classes taught by a single professor with many discussion sections taught by inexperienced loosely supervised graduate students are not popular with undergraduate students.

Summary – The survey alternative promises to encounter serious opposition and yield disappointing results. For this reason, although a faculty may prescribe a survey course or two on subjects such as the growth of Western civilizations, it will rarely devote all or even a substantial part of its general education program to courses of this type.

#4 The Modes of Inquiry Approach – “Proponents of this curriculum argue that the volume of knowledge today is far too large and changes much too rapidly to justify a program founded on a single set of books or a fixed body of essential information. Under these conditions, the best approach to take is to have students learn about the principal ways in which scholars and scientists acquire knowledge. For example, courses in history can demonstrate how a historian understand the evolution of a major problem in the contemporary world and how conditions, events, and decisions in the past contributed to its development. Courses in literature, painting, or music may give students a sense of the possibilities and limitations of different art forms and a feeling of how individual talent, artistic tradition, and the surrounding society interact to produce great works. A course in physics may convey a sense of the way science is done by considering how a series of investigators gradually conceived and validated theories leading to important laws and principles governing the world around us.�

Pro
1. It will lay a foundation that enables students to keep on learning throughout their lives.
2. Students will know enough about the techniques and terminology of different disciplines to overcome the inhibitions that could otherwise keep them from proceeding on their own to study more advanced material.
3. Becoming truly cultivated and broadly educated is a lifetime’s work, not an enterprise achievable in four short undergraduate years, but learning the principle modes of thought is the ideal way to begin.

Con
1. Often attacked for being too superficial to accomplish much of value. Can it be enugh to enable students to continue learning about science on their own or to teach them how to understand other scientific issues that later come to their attention?
2. If a faculty were to choose courses simply by their suitability for demonstrating a particular mode of thought, it could produce a curriculum conveying a hodge-podge of information that omitted many of the greatest works of literature and social thought.
3. Although the curriculum does not force professor to teach outside their areas of expert knowledge, it does require a substantial number of specially created courses in addition to the regular department offerings demanding more work from professors and imposing added costs that may take funds away from other needs.

Summary – Deans and presidents will have to display considerable skill to gain the necessary approval and commitment from the faculty for this model. Once in place, moreover, the new model will need continuous monitoring to ensure that all courses approved for the program actually help to achieve its purposes and that the curriculum does not gradually erode into incoherence.

Hybrid Models/Summary

“If any conclusion emerges from examining the principal methods of acquiring breadth, it is that none of them by itself offers an ideal solution. Each alternative has advantages that rival approaches cannot readily duplicate. Each has special disadvantages as well that are serious enough to make its adoption problematic. For this reason, many faculties are reluctant to adopt any of the models wholesale as the chosen way to give their students a broad general education.

The most common response is to create a hybrid curriculum that borrows from several of the traditional models….

Faculties that seek a hybrid solution quickly learn that borrowing an attractive feature from another model almost always requires giving up something valuable in return. Since there is no established metric for weighing what is gained against what must be given up, no one can be sure which combination will be best. This problem threatens to cast doubt on all collective efforts to revise the curriculum.

Even if perfection is impossible, however, faculties should still try periodically to review and improve upon their general education programs. Although no one proposal may be demonstrably better than other plausible approaches, each of the leading alternatives may be preferable to the curriculum currently in use. Over time, any system of requirements is likely to erode into incoherence through the gradual accumulation of exceptions and expedient solutions to unanticipated problems…..The proper way to evaluate a curriculum review, therefore, should be to ask not whether it has produced the one best curriculum – for no such thing exists – but whether it has arrived at a carefully considered result through a process that has strengthened the faculty’s commitment to undergraduate education and untied them in a clearer understanding of their common purpose