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[missmatchedsocks]

Hi Everyone,

Regular forumite here seeking advice in costume so as not to be outed.

Our SLAC* is discussing a new BA curriculum which may (or may not) entail doing away with distribution requirements.  We are firmly committed to a "liberal arts" education for our students, but we have no consensus as to what "liberal arts" means.  The choices in the poll I provided illustrate basically the factions and beliefs of our faculty.  I am personally leaning toward option #2 which, to me, represents a more 21st century liberal arts model.  
  
I'd like to hear from others.  Is a liberal arts education an experience with specific subject areas (i.e. two courses in Math, two courses in Science, two Lit. courses, two foreign lang. courses, etc.)?  Alternatively, can a liberal arts education be more broadly defined? How do "vocational" courses (e.g. business, education) fit into a liberal arts curriculum?  

These, dear friends, are the questions we are posing.  With governance that is based on faculty decision making, you can imagine that this process is incredibly onerous and moving along at glacial speeds.  

I'll take my answers off the air, thanks!

*~1200 students, ranked between 75 and 100 in national liberal arts colleges in US News and World Report, for what it's worth.

[theblondeassassin]

Given that the "liberal arts" are those which are appropriate to an educated citizen, they should include the "modern greats":

high level of competence in:
- numeracy
- literacy

an understanding of:
- culture, including religion, politics, and history
- life and physical sciences
- philosophy

An appreciation for:
- economics
- art, music and literature
- at least one other culture

I would add a component of some aspect of technology (for example, computing, environment, engineering or business).

[glowdart]

I voted "whatever the student wants," but I want to qualify that response. 

Do you teach majors that are not in the traditional liberal arts?  If so, then I'd vote "I don't like the idea of strands or distribution requirements, but I can see how that would be good for certain populations." 

If you don't offer majors that are not traditional liberal arts offerings, then let them free to wander, if you think your students can handle the wandering.  Vocational courses can fit here and there for practical application of the concepts they are learning elsewhere, but once you start allowing someone to major in Business, you're not a traditional liberal arts college anymore and the distribution requirements need to keep them focused so that your mission is still being met.

(What is your mission?  That should be guiding this discussion off-fora, too.  If you're all about global literacy, then a language requirement makes sense, etc.)   

My list, going off of TBA, is:
- high-level communication skills (written and oral)
- high-level analytical skills
- high-level numerical, textual, and visual literacy
- high-level research skills and problem-solving skills (based within a major discipline, but applicable to other situations)
- broad grounding in philosophy, history, literature, sciences, language, math, art
- specific focus in one of the traditional liberal arts areas, but with an eye to interdisciplinary overlap, since you aren't learning the ways of thinking and seeing the world above in a vacuum, nor will you be using them in a vacuum. 

...all of which they then apply to the world around them while in school and for the rest of their lives.

But, you can get that "grounding" without distribution requirements if you have the right mix of faculty and students.  If you don't have that mix, then that's where it gets trickier -- and that's where distribution requirements can come into play, as much as I hate the idea of them.  How about requiring a major and a minor instead of just a major? 

The idea, for me, is that someone with a liberal arts degree can go out into the work world and do whatever they want to do because they are prepared to pick up new skills quickly and to apply them, because they have a solid grounding in how the world works and humanity functions (or not), and because these skills and this knowledge base will enable them to move from job to job throughout their life and to move within broader society without needing complete retraining because their skills and knowledge were limited by vocational training and have been made obsolete by 10 years of advances in society & technology. 

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I would assume that students have some coursework in grammar, logic, and rhetoric, perhaps complemented by some work in arithmetic, geometry, maybe some astronomy, and - who knows - some music maybe? - DvF

[hegemony]

I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are trivial.

[peppergal]

I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are trivial.

Then could you please explain how we are to engage in scholarly dialog?  It seems to me that grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the foundation upon which all intellectual inquiry is based.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are trivial.

Then could you please explain how we are to engage in scholarly dialog?  It seems to me that grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the foundation upon which all intellectual inquiry is based.

Certainly they represent three roads to this inquiry.  Hmm, I wonder how one might say that in Latin... - DvF

[polly_mer]

I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are trivial.

Then could you please explain how we are to engage in scholarly dialog?  It seems to me that grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the foundation upon which all intellectual inquiry is based.

Certainly they represent three roads to this inquiry.  Hmm, I wonder how one might say that in Latin... - DvF

<sigh>

Peppergirl, DvF gave a smart aleck response with the quadrium and the trivium as the seven traditional parts of a liberal arts education.  The three highlighted here are the trivium.

[zharkov]

I don't really think that the categories in the poll are mutually exclusive.  So a liberal arts education could include both distributive requirements and interdisciplinary/thematic study, for example.

Returning to the seven liberal arts, while the specifics may not be on target for the 21st century, the notion that a liberally educated person is one who can reason qualitatively and quantitatively -- the trivium and quadrivium -- still holds.

PS:  One trap in designing a liberal arts curriculum is concocting a set of interdisciplinary courses, maybe an overview of social sciences or a history + lit course for the 20th century.  While I'm a fan of interdisciplinary approaches in general, the practical problem is finding full time faculty who are competent and interested in teaching these kinds of interdisciplinary liberal arts overview courses.


 

[carebearstare]

I think the problem with the second option is that it could become gimmicky or dated very quickly. In my department, we have tracks in our major that were created about 10 years ago, and in some ways parallel the kinds of things you name in the poll. A number of developments in our discipline have already made at least two of those tracks seem rather trite. In that sense, I'd stick with more "classic" designations if only because they weather the test of time better.

That said, I can see the limitations of a straightforward distribution if the real goal is producing students who are competent in the liberal arts writ large. I attended a SLAC for undergrad, and even there, where students purportedly wanted to be well rounded, humanities students avoided quantitative classes like the plague, etc. I think conceptualizing some courses/tracks/concentrations that really promoted understanding across disciplinary boundaries and critical engagement makes a lot of sense, then. For instance, interdisciplinary framing or capstone courses that were team taught across two "disparate" disciplines, or something like that, or independent student work that requires them to assess how coursework in a particular term works together, or something.

So I guess my idea would be to use the distribution, but modify it with some more built-in synthesizing that is malleable enough so you won't have to change it every five years.

[neutralname]

My first entirely cynical response, caused by many hours of unpleasant debate on various curriculum committees, is that this is a naive question, and the only realistic response is to fight, fight, fight for your own interests.  Any high-minded debate about the topic is a waste of time.  Although of course when you are on the committees, you have to frame your arguments in high-minded language to give the superficial appearance that are being objective and fair.

But supposing that there is a possibility of real exchange of ideas about these issues instead of posturing and power, I'd say the only part of the idea of a liberal education that can remain fixed is the idea of liberation and enlightenment.  Aside from that, what makes an education liberal has to be changeable and relative to context.

My other thought is that debate over the content and distribution is what gets most of the attention, when it is equally important how these courses are taught.  They need to be taught with aims of liberation and enlightenment.  Very often they are not -- instead they are taught as a form of drudgery.  So any campus debate should (rationally) focus as much on ways of teaching as the content of courses.  But politically, that is very dangerous, and people soon start defending their methods by reference to their academic freedom.

[peppergal]

I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are trivial.

Then could you please explain how we are to engage in scholarly dialog?  It seems to me that grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the foundation upon which all intellectual inquiry is based.

Certainly they represent three roads to this inquiry.  Hmm, I wonder how one might say that in Latin... - DvF

<sigh>

Peppergirl, DvF gave a smart aleck response with the quadrium and the trivium as the seven traditional parts of a liberal arts education.  The three highlighted here are the trivium.

(1) My name is PepperGAL, not Peppergirl.

(2)  Yes, I am aware of what the quadrium and trivium are.  I am probably more aware of them than most CHE readers, having been trained as a medievalist.  However, triviUM is not the same as triviAL.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I was responding to Hegemony, who seemed to be dismissing the trivium as trivial, and not DvF, whose response I understood perfectly and appreciated.

(3)  I find the snark of your <sigh> unwarranted.

OK, I just had to get that off my chest.  Back to your regularly scheduled thread now.

[systeme_d_]

My first entirely cynical response, caused by many hours of unpleasant debate on various curriculum committees, is that this is a naive question, and the only realistic response is to fight, fight, fight for your own interests.  Any high-minded debate about the topic is a waste of time.  Although of course when you are on the committees, you have to frame your arguments in high-minded language to give the superficial appearance that are being objective and fair.

Bingo.  Been there, done that.

[polly_mer]

I think grammar, logic, and rhetoric are trivial.

Then could you please explain how we are to engage in scholarly dialog?  It seems to me that grammar, logic, and rhetoric are the foundation upon which all intellectual inquiry is based.

Certainly they represent three roads to this inquiry.  Hmm, I wonder how one might say that in Latin... - DvF

<sigh>

Peppergirl, DvF gave a smart aleck response with the quadrium and the trivium as the seven traditional parts of a liberal arts education.  The three highlighted here are the trivium.

(1) My name is PepperGAL, not Peppergirl.

(2)  Yes, I am aware of what the quadrium and trivium are.  I am probably more aware of them than most CHE readers, having been trained as a medievalist.  However, triviUM is not the same as triviAL.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I was responding to Hegemony, who seemed to be dismissing the trivium as trivial, and not DvF, whose response I understood perfectly and appreciated.

(3)  I find the snark of your <sigh> unwarranted.

OK, I just had to get that off my chest.  Back to your regularly scheduled thread now.

So, you're still missing the funny (that's the sigh, because your response doesn't play off the pun properly), because you don't think that way or don't appreciate puns.  Well, as I've been told, if one must explain a joke, then the humor doesn't work. 

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I agree that the modern definition of "trivial" is antithetical to the topics in the Trivium; however:

1475  (1425)    tr. R. Higden Polychron. (Harl.) (1876) VI. 333   Sche‥hade noble auditors and disciples, to whom sche redde the arte trivialle [L. trivium legeret].
1598    Bp. J. Hall Virgidemiarvm iv. i. 12   Hath‥thrise rehears'd them in his Triuiall [printed Triniall] floare.
1807–8    S. Smith P. Plymley's Lett. x. in Wks. (1859) II. 178/2   The Protestants may likewise retain their trivial and grammar schools.
1904    W. P. Ker Dark Ages 27   Plato does not allow the mediæval classification of Dialectic as a Trivial Art along with Grammar and Rhetoric.

So "trivial art" at one time meant literally "topic from the trivium."  I think this is interesting, and wonder how and why the meaning devolved the way it did, in particular whether it was an intentional sneery devolution during some 17th century education reform movement. - DvF