Most liberal arts colleges still have some general-education requirements, although many only require some distribution of academic areas (as a new study this week confirms). We are still hesitant to define specifically a core of knowledge, and I find that healthy (despite my personal enthusiasm for Plato and his audacious attempt in The Republic to prove that doing good is really good for us. Perhaps I just find this a core question for any happy life.)

What are we actually trying to accomplish, and how might we rethink general education in a liberal arts context?

U.S. writer and academic Louis Menand suggests that the liberal arts have their roots in knowledge we pursue with “disinterest.” As Menand writes: “Garbage is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.” (This idea has its roots in some of the academic history discussed in part one of this blog series. Academic freedom and the move to distinguish scholarship as “value-neutral” were a way of balancing the religious roots of most U.S. universities. John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy founded the American Association of University Professors in 1915 partly to make sure religious or political views were not the basis for hiring, but it was also part of the professionalization of faculty. Is scholarship really disinterested and devoid of personal values? Should it be?

One side of the coin is the benefit to analyzing all sides of an issue from the relative safety of the blackboard (or the Ivory Tower). Americans tend to use “academic” as a pejorative synonym for “theoretical,” “abstract,” or even “useless,” but theory and “disinterest” are useful precisely because they provide us with an abstract space to play with alternatives without having to make up our minds. Planning for contingencies that have not and might not happen is the essence of practical strategy—for games, business, or life.

The ability to always see the other side of a debate or issue can, of course, also be debilitating (and incredibly irritating to your children). While we mistakenly draw a clear bright line between theory and practice, we do, in fact, often need action, which requires a decision. Art works the same way: There may be lots of equally good or interesting ways to play Hamlet or paint a tree, but picking one at a time and doing it with conviction is essential for any good performance.

“Disinterest” is also seen as a pillar of science. We tend to privilege the “scientific method” as being separate from politics or bias, but even science is guided by the interests and priorities of scientists and the government. We can’t ever be entirely disinterested or rational, but disciplinary training provides a framework.

This is sometimes used as a justification for the humanities: Science may be peering intently at the real world, but it is using a lens, and the humanities is the study of that lens. Similarly, the “academic disinterest” of majors like classics or art is defended precisely because it is abstract and removed from the practical.

In his book Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation economist Tyler Cowan argues that we should emphasize the economic power of the humanities in business. He has a point: Creativity and an understanding of the human condition are surely useful in any enterprise. And these skills easily and often translate into employment. Still, I hesitate to make the value of general or liberal education purely economic.

As a musician and historian, I recognize that I am odd. I am comfortable with Kant’s definition of aesthetics as only the “useless” bit. (And while I think Kant’s task is impossible, I LOVE that he is trying to separate judgments of taste from judgments of beauty. So I find it a bit odd when folks try to defend something (the humanities or the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, for example) that I don’t feel needs defending. (No one feels the need to defend ice cream or chocolate.) But I am odd.

Academics call the units or departments of our world “disciplines.” These are internally consistent and self-governing systems of value. As the word “disciplines” implies, they provide discipline—a structure for organizing and verifying knowledge. They can, equally, be confining.

Another common function of general education, therefore, is to introduce students to the different disciplines (or systems of thought). More recently, some general-education programs are trying to create a space for a renewed desire for interdisciplinarity. (Remember that the question of whether to teach general education inside or outside the disciplines was an important difference between the distribution and core systems of general education.)

For all of this history and suspicion of the practical, the liberal arts are not truly disinterested. Many disciplines and institutions (like Goucher) are also deeply invested in the world, real problems, the character of our students, and especially our local community. Many liberal arts skills are also manifestly practical. Writing skills, for example, are at once a prime vehicle for thinking through abstract complex problems and the world’s most important job skill.

The Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce has demonstrated that a college degree does, indeed, have a lifetime economic benefit: A bachelor’s degree is on average worth $1.3M more over a lifetime of earnings. That is great news, but I hope it is worth even more than that.

Goucher has joined the small group of schools using the Gallup/Purdue index to measure how specific experiences in college (like having a professor believe in your future success) have a profound impact on future workplace happiness.

General education has then been conceived as a way:
1- to stimulate learning for its own sake
2- to connect students to the real world
3- to give students a common cultural or intellectual vocabulary
4- to introduce students to a variety of ways of thinking.

Some of these seem mutually exclusive, and clarifying which of these matters for each program is an important first step in helping students understand how the pieces of a distribution system come together.

Content was never the primary goal of a liberal arts education, but with the increased pace of new knowledge and our easy access to more content on every device, thinking and analysis have become even more important. This makes integration evermore important in the design of our new general-education systems. The whole now truly has to be more than the sum of the pieces.

LAST PART: Happiness, values, and integration

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In part two of our discussion about general education, we saw how making the bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for professional school create the U.S. liberal arts curriculum, but simultaneously it separated undergraduate education from the “real world.”

General education requirements were introduced to try and bridge this gap.

We can see early examples of this in the core courses universities introduced during the First World War. Columbia’s famous contemporary civilization course was initially called “War Aims.” Stanford and Dartmouth followed suit with courses on “Problems of Citizenship.” Williams called its version “American National Problems.” Eventually these became the common “Western Civ” requirements.

These core courses had a social motive to give students a common understanding of society, shared value judgments, universal traits and outlooks, and a collective experience that would bind society together. Columbia’s other famous core course, “Literature Humanities,” was organized initially by English Professor John Erskine, who was worried that new immigrants and especially Jewish students, would not share in the common culture of the “great Anglo-Saxon writers.” In 1934, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling (a student of Erskine’s) revived this as “The Colloquium in Important Books.”

Harvard’s core originated in a 1945 report “General Education in a Free Society,” which became known as “The Redbook” (because of its crimson binding). Harvard President James Bryant Conant (who served from 1933 to 1953) discovered that the elective system had, indeed, created more courses, but he also hoped to create a meritocracy and began using the new SAT test for admissions. Conant thought the elective system was too easy to game and not integrated enough. But “The Redbook” also had a clear social motive to give students “a common … understanding of the society which they will possess in common” as Americans at the beginning of the Cold War. General education was, in other words, driven by fears of increasing social mobility and declining moral authority in a time of national crisis.

To make a long story very short, as both the canon and society were opened up in the 1960s, curricular cores had to change; they became about method and learning how to learn. Brown introduced “Modes of Thought” courses in 1969, and Harvard created a core in 1970 requiring students to take courses in 7 or 11 areas (still extra-departmental). In 1974, Michigan introduced “Approaches to Knowledge.”

Some of this also represents a crisis of confidence in what the “core” knowledge or context might be for all students, which was also part of the 1960s revolution. As the college population and the faculty began to diversify, scholars began to study new and more diverse traditions. Faculty and students specifically rejected many of the common “value judgments” of the old core. The same books assigned to bind us together, could also alienate.

In the same way that Barzun and Trilling at Columbia taught books that were “important” (and not because of great truths they contained), the renamed “Western Civ” programs justified their core texts simply as a common heritage. I taught in a Great Works first-year course at Stanford in the 1980s. While it did include great works by women and colonized people, it was still largely the Western intellectual tradition. I liked that the title made clear it was a value judgment, but I am still of two minds about this issue.

As a musician, I want to teach work I think is great, but I also feel compelled to teach work I think is important (even when it is not to my taste). A work can be “great” for a variety of reasons and within a tremendous variety of aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual systems. (All judgments are institutional or cultural in a way.) As a teacher, I try to help students understand why someone thinks these works are important, and having a wider variety of texts and cultures is helpful in that. (It demonstrates, for example, that there are many ways to evaluate greatness.) But I also think understanding the Western intellectual tradition is important—and useful!—for living in the West, in the same way that being able to write clear standard English is useful.

Teaching in England taught me that I write like an American: One of my British department chairs took the time to point out that my style was “far too breezy, direct, and concise.” I was encouraged to be “less Hemingway and more scholarly”—even in email! My point is I learned to recognize the value of different styles without having to prioritize one as being best. I still speak to my jazz friends in a very different language than I use in class or in my academic prose. Is there a way to teach both great works and important skills without privileging one tradition? Is there a way to keep one foot in the real world, while still fostering that love of learning for its own sake?

Suppose the point of general education (and perhaps even the graduation standard) was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at once? Previous editions of general education tried both to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and the real world and prepare students to live in that same real world. Imagine the real-world implications for our nation if opening minds was the actual result of general education?

PART FOUR:  “Ways of Knowing“

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For most institutions, this core liberal arts mission happens in the general education curriculum, a unique feature of U.S. higher education.

Today, we have two broad types of general education: the distribution model and the core model. Most colleges use the distribution model, where students get “breadth” by taking a mandated variety of courses within different departments. This gives both faculty and students great flexibility. A core system (like Columbia’s) works differently: Here all students take a set of extra-departmental courses specially designed for this purpose. Many colleges (like Goucher) have a mix of the two.

These two models represent two very different conceptions of the liberal arts. The distribution model says the liberal arts can’t be reduced to any specific body of knowledge. Basically, any and every course in general education will provide students with a way of thinking that is more important than specific content. (I like this idea, but I suspect we don’t connect things as well as we could.) The core model is the reverse: Specific ideas, values, and texts matter—not just any literature course will do. (I like this idea, too, but mostly because of the idea of a common intellectual experience.)

To understand the roots of general education, we need to start in the 19th century, when a bachelor’s degree consisted only of required courses. Before this, there weren’t any general education or majors. In the 1860s, college enrollments were declining, in part because students were given the choice between a bachelor’s degree OR an easier and more professional degree in law, medicine, or science.

When Charles Eliot arrived as the president of Harvard in 1869, half of the law students and almost three-quarters of the medical students had not previously been to college and did not hold undergraduate degrees. At the time, Harvard Law School had no admissions requirements beyond evidence of “good character” and the ability to pay the hundred-dollar tuition.Eliot had the brilliant idea that the bachelor’s degree could be a prerequisite for professional or graduate school (instead of being a separate equal path). This raised standards and made the professional schools more selective. Eliot had returned from Europe influenced by the German model, where universities of greater disciplinary specificity had become a national economic engine through research, and he introduced both ideas to U.S. higher education. This also led him to create separate professional (graduate) doctoral programs in 1872.

One final Eliot innovation was the introduction of the elective system. If students were going to get professional training later, then the undergraduate degree could be, as he wrote in The Atlantic, “the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects.” (Eliot’s critics also pointed out that electives brought a loss of coherence, depth, AND breadth.)

All of these innovations—the bachelor’s degree as preparation for graduate school, the creation of autonomous departmental fields of study, the elective system, and an emphasis on research—were all widely imitated. They were all expensive, but Harvard could afford it. Eliot understood this, but he bargained that faculty would support it because they could teach what they wanted. By allowing students to choose professors—Eliot also created the modern course with a name, number, and professor listed—he also hoped teaching would improve. Most of the schools that copied this Harvard model, of course, did not have the same resources, but this collection of ideas has defined U.S. higher education ever since.

This kind of curricular freedom radically changed U.S. higher education. The absolute separation of undergraduate education from the vocational professional schools, and the separation of knowledge into individual disciplines, triumphed, created the U.S. liberal arts ideal, and opened the door for a massive expansion of bachelor’s degrees. However, it also created a stubborn resistance to connecting undergraduate learning across disciplines and with the “real world.” General education was invented to try and bridge the gap between both the disciplines inside the academy and the world beyond its walls.

PART THREE:  Education and the “real world” 

We’d love to see your comments on the Goucher College Facebook Page too. More on Goucher’s Mindfulness Themed Semester here.