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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stan Katz

The Big Questions and General Education



Last week I attended a seminar on the history of general education with a number of other people who are trying to think how general education might best be presented to college students. Many of us are familiar with the larger outlines of the story, which begins with the World War I efforts at Columbia University and travels through Robert Maynard Hutchins’s University of Chicago to James Bryant Conant’s Harvard.

The standard story, of course, ignores many interesting and promising developments at less well-known institutions, and in any case becomes too complicated to follow in the post-general-education era of the 1970s and beyond — multiple versions of “core” curricula, and much more. But the larger idea of a more general education persists, even though it means many different things to many different people.

I have been asked to carry on a “conversation” on the subject at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in Seattle this coming January — I suppose because many of us committed to liberal education (whatever we mean by that phrase) cannot get it out of our heads that we owe our students something more than disciplinary (or professional) education.

But we also know that students are voting (by selecting majors) for the practical — The Chronicle reported on September 9 that the number of majors in economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has risen from 183 to 442 over the past decade. I believe that economics is currently the largest field of concentration at my own liberal-arts university. And in larger universities, such as Wisconsin, the School of Commerce probably attracts as many or more concentrators. Overall, of course, the problem is not so much the decline in enrollments in the humanities and social sciences, as the flight from the arts and sciences. Physics and math are hurting too, and for the same reasons.

One emerging response to this situation is a growing emphasis on “asking the big questions,” as President Robert Connor of the Teagle Foundation has been suggesting for the past couple of years. Another is the grant program recently initiated by Chairman Bruce Cole at the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Enduring Questions.” The program will provide small grants for “pre-disciplinary” pilot courses that address “the most fundamental concerns of the humanities.” Yet another version is the movement by politically conservative funders to (according to The New York Times) attempt “a different approach on college campuses.” While one of the conservative funders is quoted as saying that he desires courses that “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and post-modernism in general,” most of the grant recipients seem to be creating very traditional Great Books courses of one sort or another.

I will come back in another blog to the political question raised by these explicitly conservative-funded programs. What interests me for the moment is a small but growing emphasis on seeking underclass (freshman and sophomore) curricula focusing on universal questions. This was explicitly one of the goals of traditional general-education programs, after all — when I was an undergraduate, one of our general-education choices was a humanities course on “Good and Evil and Western Culture.” But can we turn the clock back to such courses? Is such a move necessarily political? If not, how can we integrate such courses into the mainstream of undergraduate education so that economics majors in Madison will enroll in them and benefit from them? Is there a better way to resurrect general education?

Posted at 07:48:02 AM on October 2, 2008 | All postings by Stan Katz

Comments

  1. I think part of the issue is that out core courses have become remedial classes. What do all undergrads need to take? Basic reading, writing and math skills courses, which either repeat or teach for the first time what a student should have learned in high school. Is it possible to teach freshman writing using “great books” and “large questions?” Certainly. But there has to be a movement from faculty, textbook publishers, and university administrations. And how do you work this in when your students can’t even use a comma correctly?

    — Sherbygirl · Oct 2, 08:36 AM · #

  2. As I’m getting ready to retire from the Navy’s Chaplain Corps and finish my EdD, I look back with some regret that my first to years of college at the University of Florida, ill-fated as they were, didn’t include more of the classics or the deep questions of philosophy. I’m also disappointed that the only coursework I’ve taken that even touched on Logic came through Sermon Preparation in my MDiv. The more I hear about classic Christian education’s approach (e.g. New St. Andrews College), the more interesting it become. My essentialist philosophy, though, won’t let me release the practical aspects of education just yet. Blessings…

    — Chaplain Mike Peyton · Oct 2, 09:22 AM · #

  3. “While one of the conservative funders is quoted as saying that he desires courses that ‘work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and post-modernism in general,’ most of the grant recipients seem to be creating very traditional Great Books courses of one sort or another.”

    I’m not sure why this is presented as an implicit contrast, as though the conservative funders of great-books programs were somehow not getting the anti-[race/class/gender studies] material they were paying for. We don’t need to resurrect the entire tired “canon wars” playbook here in order to remember that Great Books is not just a collection of materials which can then be read in any way desired, but in fact already a way of reading, a whole set of highly contentious cultural-political ideas (about what those books are, what they do, what their relationship to other non-Great books and to each other means). There are many fairly obvious ways of doing gen-ed and “big questions” without imposing a cultural-conservative program on the level of the curriculum; Great Books, though, is through and through a creature of the right.

    — Roger · Oct 2, 10:44 AM · #

  4. We are in the midst of general education review at the institution I serve as Provost. One of the key elements in our conceptualization is that students should “recognize Big Questions”. We have consciously avoided defining what those questions should be and focused on what characterizes Big Questions. Inquiry Skills are developed in the process of attempting to address the Big Questions. As a Christian institution, we are also attempting to add a third strand of conversation speaking to how those questions should be addressed, how we relate to other positions, and the difference we expect it to make in the broader society after graduation. This third strand is considered “Graceful Engagement”. We’ve got a long way to go, but it’s encouraging to see that others are exploring the same ideas.

    — John Hawthorne · Oct 2, 10:51 AM · #

  5. As a freshman, fifty years ago, I was immersed in a general education curriculum in a Christian college. Some really outstanding courses were included—many of them team taught. There was a three-quarter science sequence that included physics & astronomy, chemistry, and biology; a “social science” sequence that included political science, economics, American history, and social psychology; a three-quarter sequence called “communication skills;” an excellent three-quarter sequence called “western arts;” and a three-quarter sequence called “biblical philosophy.” The latter included a good dose of logic and critical thinking, along with comparative religions, and critical examination of the doctrinal positions of the church with which the college was affiliated. For the most part, these were really outstanding courses, taught by highly qualified people. The most glaring void was the complete absence of learning about evolutionary biology—they need not have taught us that natural selection was accepted as fact in mainstream biology. It might have been enough to introduce us to the concepts that are generally addressed in biology. One instructor did mention evolution and was promptly fired. I recall that this complicated things at the little college because her husband was the newly hired chairman of the theology department. Ah well….

    The general education courses were tremendously helpful to me. After teaching a one-room school in Arizona for a year and spending two years in the Army in Europe, I returned to college and built on that general education and life experience foundation. It took me several years to complete my undergraduate education, but I feel that those early general education courses—even though some were limited in their perspective—launched me on a trajectory toward a fuller and richer life than I might have otherwise had.

    — Joe Erwin · Oct 2, 12:48 PM · #

  6. “Great Books, though, is through and through a creature of the right.”

    This is an unhelpful simplification. There are plenty of leftists out there who support the idea of an education focused on a study of “the Great Books.”

    — crazy horse · Oct 2, 01:40 PM · #

  7. “Great Books, though, is through and through a creature of the right.”

    Sorry, but this is just moronic, and it is exactly the kind of fashionable academic prejudice that helps to keep poor people ignorant. Try Earl Shorris for another perspective.

    — Not Roger · Oct 2, 08:45 PM · #

  8. I received a “great books” undergrad education, and a critical theory grad education. I have to admit that my undergraduate studies stayed with me far more than my graduate theory courses, which were pretty much a blur. It wasn’t that the questions weren’t “big” in grad school. Quite the contrary: they were enormous. One would take a class in race and class in 20th-century American lit, and the lit would serve to answer such questions as: what is race? what is class? and worse: how do we know? what is the basis of our claims to knowledge about these issues?

    The questions that the literature itself posed were ignored. Indeed, the literature was all but ignored.

    Big Questions were what circled and ensnared us, class after class, and dizzy and crazy and stuffed like Spenser’s Error with competing and unreliable positions and ideas we wrote unreadable seminar papers and dissertations and then the luckiest of us, perhaps the most incoherent, stumbled out and got jobs.

    Years later I find myself sorting through the debris and discover that most of what I draw upon in my thinking and teaching is what I learned in the kindergarten of my college career: those wonderful “great” books and the marvelous undergrad profs who taught them with humility and attention.

    As any who teach literature know, any book can be taught to serve any agenda.

    I guess my question is this: what do you mean by “Big Questions”? I think we’d do better to ask small ones. In fact, one of my undergrad professors used to say (and I now quote to my students all the time): “Big questions, little answers. Little questions, big answers.”

    — femme finale · Oct 3, 08:19 AM · #

  9. I wish that we could have a serious discussion of these issues at my public university. In my short time here, I have heard several faculty say, in public settings, that our general education curriculum is not an educational document, but a political one (keeping courses in my department full).

    The most elementary question about “what are we trying to do in general education” is met with pained expressions and exclamations: “You just don’t know what it was like when we last revised gen ed a dozen years ago. No one wants to go back to that again.”

    People look at me like I am from Mars when I ask if we could develop a common understanding of, say, critical thinking that we could reinforce in multiple courses throughout students’ time with us.

    And the idea that we would actually attempt to determine what students actually learn through our curriculum . . .

    We can’t ask “Big Questions” IN general education if we are unwilling to entertain any questions ABOUT general education.

    — sigh · Oct 3, 09:56 AM · #

  10. “Great Books, though, is through and through a creature of the right.” Regardless of the truth-status of that claim, the great books themselves are definitely not creatures of the right – nor of the left or center.

    — phiwilli · Oct 3, 03:09 PM · #

  11. Thanks, Stan, for again putting these central questions so well. As I’m sure you are aware, first-year writing courses, or writing intensive courses have been the “places” where large questions, owned by no particular discipline, have often been addressed. Indeed, a popular argument text in the last quarter of the century was entitled CURRENT ISSUE AND ENDURING QUESTIONS. It and others like it did a pretty good job of situating currently relevant questions in a larger historical context. I should qualify this praise, though, with the caveat that James Crosswhite puts so well in his THE RHETORIC OF REASON, (P 283), namely, that there is a limited use to using hot-button topics where teachers’ and students’ commitments stifle inquiry and do not demand an admission that developing a stand often means respecting a the requirement that an opinion be duly informed and considered rather than merely pronounced.

    I do fear that #9’s disenchantment may be typical, but that should not stop discussion. Certainly Joe Erwin’s testimony and is not mere nostalgia, and I look forward to hearing more, with some attention paid also to the fact that those teaching gen ed courses are typically the least rewarded and often most penalized for not doing the allegedly more substantive work in their “discipline.”

    “I suppose because many of us committed to liberal education (whatever we mean by that phrase) cannot get it out of our heads that we owe our students something more than disciplinary (or professional) education.” Aye, there’s the rub. Can we discuss a generalized literacy we wish our students to acquire, or was Socrates, rather than Protaforas right, that we are bound always to particular disciplines or fields of “expertise,” and talk about a general intelligence is a chimera?

    — George T. Karnezis · Oct 4, 12:49 AM · #

  12. There are decent if not wonderful social science methods for asking and answering questions like “what is an educated human being” and “what worth does being educated add to a life and career and how does it compare in impact, magnitude, and felt-value with wealth and other measures of ‘success’?”

    Until the arts and sciences and humanities and social sciences validate the worth of what they teach and how they teach it, bad-minded and narrow-bigot outsiders will raise questions, create political trouble, and raise general hell.

    So why don’t the arts and sciences and humanities and social sciences get off their duffs and do some research to define what they are, what they do, and what value it adds to current lives? Why don’t they do that? Why do they NOT do that? Why do they continue not doing that? Why do they whine instead? Whine, whine, whine—poor little misunderstood me, poor little unappreciated me, poor little misconstrued me, poor me, poor me.

    Disgusting wimps.

    I became a professor late in life and at the U of Chicago realized when facing my first students I did not have the slightest idea of what educating them might consist of. I bought 200 books, many on the philosopy or heroic figures in higher education and they each promoted their own narrow view, not based on any data (usually some ideologic gripe, religious nuttiness, or personal personality defect behind most of them, disguised as an assumed “human nature”). I held myself to higher standards than those 200 tomes of crap.

    SO, I asked 315 eminent people in 63 diverse professions (stratified sample) half global half USA to nominate the most “educated acting people you know” and what made them identify such people as highly educated-acting. Then I and my assistants interviewed 150 of those nominated as highly educated, keeping the 63 diverse profession strata and half USA and half global nature of the first sample. The results, analyzed, formed a model of 64 capabilities of highly educated people, at least 32 of which I personally knew nothing about and by that definition I was NOT AT ALL educated. I wrote a nice 1500 page book on the results and taught it to generations of students.

    I do not have ideolog itch, bigot bite, religio righteousness problems because when such nuts attack what I do or say in class I send them a 1500 page book of research on what better people than they (and than me) said educatedness was and ask them to provide evidence for their stupid views to match the quality of evidence for mine. I teach the opinions of some 8000+ people about what educatedness is, not my own opinions, not some religion’s opinions, not some ideolog’s opinions, not some bigot’s opinions, not some one famous old dead professor’s opinions. Everyone who attacks my classes and their contents has NO empiric basis, NO research data, and NO scientific support whatsoever for their crazed nutty stupid bigotted bile-ish bunk ideas and preferences.

    Whining does not work—research works, stop whining and bellyaching and do some work like adults should. Whine, whine, whine, poor us poor us poor us, wimp wimp wimp. Geez will they never grow up.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Oct 4, 06:49 AM · #

  13. How sad to read this last comment with its toxic and splenetic outburst and its Roveian caricaturing of wooly headed humanities people as blithering whiners. While I have no illusions about the virtues of those teaching in the humanities, and regretted the lack of teaching preparation I had in acquiring my degrees (one from UC), thankfully I refused to cast myself into the impotent and besieged victim RTG asks us to sympathize with.

    I can only hope that RTG has a day better than the one he had when he inflicted this last splenetic outburst upon us. Stan’s work does not warrant this sort of response.

    I might suggest Michael Oakshott’s THE VOICE OF LIBERAL LEARNING as an interesting 20th century effort to think about liberal education outside a narrowly instrumentalist position and yet not succumb to merely celebratory observations. I don’t think RTG should read it though. It would leave him in a fit of apoplexy.

    — George Karnezis · Oct 4, 10:06 PM · #

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