Last Wednesday’s edition of the Technician included a very alarming column about general education classes, written by Kevin Kronk. In the column, Kronk says the general education requirements should be abolished due to opportunity cost and lack of interest. This sentiment should be alarming and disturbing because it goes entirely against the idea of university education.
Opportunity cost refers to the costs associated with pursuing one endeavor whilst another could be pursued, or as Kronk says, “Wasted time means wasting opportunities.” According to Kronk, “Required courses detract from students’ ability to focus on what matters to them.” Here he was referring to extracurricular activities in which students engage, of which it is true that many students feel pressure to maintain a life outside of the classroom. However, in the university setting, one’s studies must take precedence. This is not truly an argument against GEP courses, but rather against high-course loads in general.
In regard to Kronk’s claim of lack of interest, the general education requirements are very broad. For example, some students are required to take six hours of social sciences. Social sciences run the gamut from political science to archaeology to economics. Another example is the interdisciplinary perspectives requirement, which includes courses as diverse as STS 301 (Science and Civilization) and HI 482 (Darwinism in Science and Society). Surely students can find something to pique their interest. Or, if not, they may gain a new interest in a field they had never considered.
Unfortunately, despite being an indefensible position, there is a definite push to eliminate the liberal arts from university education. In 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory startled many people when he said, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it, but I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” People who make asinine comments such as this seem to be missing the purpose of a university education.
Students do not go to college simply to get a job. That is the purpose of a technical school. The goal of a university is to broaden minds and create educated members of the human race. Education is not an a la carte smattering of interests. In fact, liberal education comprises a long and glorious tradition. The goal of liberal education is quite literally to liberate people from the bonds of ignorance, from Plato’s cave.
Kronk says, “There is nothing more that GEPs can offer us that high school, books and the Internet don’t already provide.” The truth is that high schools fail to cover many things. Essential elements of what it means to be a human are ignored, such as philosophy, race relations, gender studies and anthropology. These fields likely will not generate many jobs, but there is far more to life than work. Ignoring these key aspects of the human condition will not fully prepare people to grasp their place in the world.
People like Kronk and McCrory would like to see every student only take classes in their major and for everyone to major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields. Although STEM fields are certainly important, the world also needs writers and humanities scholars. These people seem to misunderstand the concept of “major.” A major is not what one studies exclusively, but rather what one focuses on whilst learning about other subjects, as well. To quote the historian C. V. Wedgwood, “An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.”
Typically, conservatives are the ones who want to restructure the curriculum so as to remove humanities and social sciences. This is ironic because this desire cuts against a millennium of tradition. Perhaps it is best that conservatives do not like change if this is the change that they suggest. The first universities, founded in the Middle Ages, gave students an education in the Classical thinkers. These universities were founded around the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The goal of this education was not to prepare people for jobs, but to broaden their minds and allow them better to understand their place in the world. In fact, the majority of the graduates became either doctors, scholars or members of the clergy.
I do agree with Kronk when he says “students need room to breathe and grow.” However, taking away the general education requirements will only serve to increase the overall ignorance of the population. A world full of engineers and scientists would certainly include great works of architecture and new discoveries.
But there would be something missing without the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the philosophy of Plato and the political thought of John Stuart Mill. There would be little independent thought and less creativity. And a people such as this would be very easy to control. It would be a dystopia. Certainly it would not be an invidious, totalitarian state as in George Orwell’s “1984.” Rather it would be a seemingly nice place like Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” where everyone is happy only because they do not see their own bonds.
