The UNC-System and higher education in North Carolina have been taking a lot of heat since the Republicans took control of the legislature and governorship.
In January, the newly elected Gov. Pat McCrory said on a radio talk show that he wanted to change the way the UNC-System was funded. What he meant was to revamp the curriculum of general courses in the UNC-System and measure the effectiveness of education by looking at how many graduates get jobs. Another curriculum attack came in late October. This time it was from the right-leaning John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, and it has brought even more attention to campuses.
The Pope Center released commentary that attacked UNC-Chapel Hill’s general education courses. Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson, the authors of the proposal, called UNC-CH’s current curriculum “incoherent,” as it offers more than 4,000 courses from which students can choose to fill the 41 required credit hours. The authors of the report pointed out that many of the courses are too trivial and narrow, claiming that they don’t help students develop the professional skills needed in their future careers. They propose an “optimal” alternative curriculum that reduces the number of available general education courses to approximately 700. The remaining courses fall into one of these two categories: reasoning or ideas and cultural knowledge.
The Pope Center’s proposal emphasizes reasoning, civil society, western civilization, American history and morality, which is a decent proposal without question. But the study is somehow confused with what an average college student should learn compared to what high school students already learn. High school graduates are expected to have basic knowledge of reasoning and the history of the West (specifically, the history of the United States). Not everyone goes to college, but everyone is part of society and able to exercise their rights to vote regardless of their level of education. Thus, these subjects should be taught to everyone in high school.
For example, the Constitution, rule of law and the court system are the most important components of a civil society. Learning these fundamental concepts at early age helps foster a people who know how to resolve their differences in the court rather than through violence, how to respect court rulings even when judges are wrong and how to exercise and protect everyone’s equal constitutional rights. In an interview, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia strongly suggested that high school students should be required to read the Federalist Papers because he argues that knowing how the Constitution works is a citizen’s obligation. This demonstrates how the Pope Center’s proposal should be applied to public high schools and not just college students.
The study bashes the faculty members for the numerous trivial courses by saying that “many [professors] regard [the curriculum] as a means to advance their own department’s courses and even their own narrow fields of research.” But UNC-CH is one of the top-tier research universities in the nation, and many top research universities offer even more trivial courses. Teaching and researching are closely related. Students who have ambitions to seek truth in these top-tier colleges are able to be exposed to courses taught by world-class professors. These “narrow and trivial” courses might trigger students’ thinking about their future and serve as guidance to their career. Furthermore, the subjects of the classes themselves are not necessarily the most important part of education. Instead, it’s the way that courses are taught, the reading materials and the clash of different ideas through discussion that matter the most. Much of the knowledge that students gain in college has little to do with their future careers. But the way of thinking and solving problems benefits them for the rest of their lives.
The authors of the study are also concerned that college students might fall into false theories and eccentric ideas delivered by professors. That concern is totally overstated. As they point out, there are 4,700 courses available for students to choose. Given that amount, there is competition for students between departments and faculties. If only a few students enroll in a course, it’s more likely to be taken out of the curriculum. Even if a theory or proposal is wrong, such as Marxism, it still needs to be studied and discussed so that we understand why it is wrong and what disasters it could cause. What one should fear is not false theories, but the freedom to choose between right and false.
