General ed classes play vital role in education
General education should address what students are interested in and what they need to know as human beings, said Louis Menand and Alison Simmons, visiting Harvard professors.
Menand and Simmons spoke to faculty and students Thursday in a lecture entitled “General Education and its Discontents.”
Charlie Huenemann, associate dean of the college of humanities and social sciences (HASS), said Menand and Simmons spoke as part of an ongoing series on general education within the college. HASS is fairly new, he said, and because the college provides a large chunk of general education requirements, it is necessary to make sure that general education within is efficient and of higher quality.
“By bringing in Louis Menand and Alison Simmons,” Huenemann said, “we help to think about the quality issue, to think about new ways of doing things. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the general education experience good or even better, but also be able to afford it.”
Menand is an English professor at Harvard University and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “The Metaphysical Club.” He is also the literary editor at “The New Yorker” and a contributing editor for “The New York Review.”
The lecture centered on ideas from his more recent novel, “The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.”
“General education is a 20th-century phenomenon,” Menand said, “and in some respects, it’s the most modern part of the modern university.” He said general education programs attempt to answer the question, “What does every college graduate need to know?”
Menand discussed the history of generals and touched upon both their successes and failures at Columbia University and Harvard. Many general education classes emerged at the universities around the time of World Wars I and II, providing students with general knowledge about war and the world around them. In many ways, these efforts launched the popularity of general education courses, Menand said.
Following Menand, Alison Simmons, professor of philosophy at Harvard, discussed co-chairing a task force with Menand to reform general education at Harvard.
Simmons said in reforming the general education courses, the committee had to come up with goals and the ways to achieve them to best help students.
“The first thing that we noted is that only 10 percent of Harvard graduates go on to be academics … that’s not very many,” Simmons said. “We thought, ‘Why are we devoting so much of our energy trying to teach these students to become little versions of ourselves?'”
Simmons said that, rather than devoting teaching to bringing students into their discipline, the faculty should show them how their disciplines can bear on the rest of their lives.
General education needs to bear on the 21st century life, she said, and it also needs to excite students. In their examination of general education, the Harvard committee found a disconnect between extracurricular activities and classes. Many students, she said, liked their extracurricular activities better than any other part of college.
“Undergraduates are doers. We thought we should take advantage of that fact in our gen. ed. courses,” she said.
One such “doing” class is “The Science of Cooking,” a course Harvard has adopted along with other universities. It is a course on soft matter physics that uses food as its medium, she said.
She described one result of such a course saying, “One team got together with a local chef and decided they were going to figure out how to make the best tasting gluten free pasta. They did it, and that chef is using their pasta in her restaurant. That’s the kind of thing that gen. ed. should be doing.”
Simmons said that uncertainty is another obstacle that holds teachers and students back.
“We need to help students reason and act efficiently and with confidence in a rapidly changing world that’s filled with uncertainties, both so they can act as responsible citizens, and so they have some degree of control over their own lives.”
The world is interconnected, she said, and general education courses should show students that. They should challenge assumptions and help students to defend their own beliefs, she added.
Next Thursday at noon, a student panel will discuss how Utah State’s HASS could benefit from such changes to its general education courses.
Huenemann said, “We get caught up in the day to day stuff. You’ve got to take your classes, sometimes you go to work, take care of kids and so on. I think students oftentimes don’t get the chance to sit back and reflect on how their education looks as a whole, like where it started and where they are now and where they’re going with it. A lot of the discussions about general education try to do that.”
“Events like this,” he added, “make it really fun to be at a University, where we’re exploring, not just ideas, but how we learn ideas.”
– ariwrees@gmail.com