The Mail: Science in General Education

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I should like to comment on Joel Cohen's thoughtful article in the May 17 CRIMSON, "Science in General Education."

I had something to do with writing the sections on the sciences and mathematics in the 1945 report, General Education in a Free Society (The Redbook). It seems a little strange, therefore, to see those sections quoted now as though they represent an enduring gospel, and departing from them involves a heresy, one perhaps in which I am myself participating. We had, of course, no unique access to truth at the time that report was written, and that was about twenty years ago. We face another world, another stage in the development of science, a new type of student: even I have changed. What one hopes survives from such a report is a clear statement of intent, and a few general principles. No report should ever be made a test of the validity of what is actually done. Such reports might further general education; they must never be permitted to limit it. Anytime that General Education bursts the bounds that some report has set for it, with some clear advantage to show, that is all to the good. Teaching is a living, dialectical relationship between the teacher and the students in the context of their time.

Mr. Cohen speaks of the "drift toward the departmental" of General Education courses in science. Clearly he interprets that phrase to mean that departmental preoccupations are invading these courses. But what if, as I hope, the opposite is true, and the attitudes of General Education are invading the departments?

There should be nothing esoteric in what one means by a General Education course. It seems to me that any such course has two major characteristics: (1) It is complete within itself, so far as it goes, rather than designed primarily as preparation for further courses in the subject. (2) It has a primary concern with relevance. Its job among other things is to develop relationships with other areas of interest--to expose what the field under discussion has to contribute to the non-specialist, to the general culture. Any course that satisfies these two criteria should be a proper candidate for General Education.

Victory for Gen Ed

There is only one way in which a course should ever become both General Education and departmental. That is, to be the best General Education course that the person giving it can devise. Then if the department recognizes this to be something it wishes to give departmental status, that is a signal victory for General Education, not a subversive inroad upon it.

Actually the very paragraph in the Redbook from which Mr. Cohen quotes the beginning, ends with this very thought: "The claim of General Education is that the history of science is part of science. So are its philosophy, its great literature, and its social and intellectual context. The contribution of science instruction to the life of the university and to society should include these elements, since science includes them. A science course so constructed as to encompass these elements makes an important contribution to General Education. It need not by that token make a poorer contribution to an education in science. One can defend the view that it is all the better science for being good General Education." (Redbook, p. 222; not italicized in the original.)

What this is saying, and what I still believe to be true, is that a properly designed General Education course in science may also constitute the best introduction to the field for the potential concentrator. This is General Education coming into the departments, not the departments subverting General Education. It seems to me the best thing that could possibly happen.

We are trying to give such a course in Natural Sciences 5. Let me put the matter as plainly as I can: If I were asked to give Natural Sciences 5 for General Education students alone, I would not change it in any way; and if conversely I were asked to give it exclusively for students entering the Biology Department, I would not change it in any way. It is my idea of the best course for both groups; and I see an enormous advantage in both types of students taking it together. In that way the science students are faced constantly with the search for meaning and relevance; and the General Education students derive an inestimable advantage from their association with a group of students with an enduring interest and commitment to the field. None of us associated with this course would now think of going on with either group alone.

When at the time the Redbook was written I searched for intellectual matrices within which the facts and procedures of science might find pattern, relevance, and meaning. I looked to the history, philosophy, literature, and cultural contributions of the sciences to provide these matrices. Now, twenty years later, I think we have something far better. This is the unity and relevance that science now finds in nature itself. Science is undergoing a profound revolution, and this is at the heart of it. We can now see the universe in a hierarchy of states of organization of matter, stretching without essential discontinuity from the ultimate particles to living organisms. We recognize also that we live in a historical universe, which in the course of its development progresses through such a hierarchy. Surely this is now the most illuminating and profound thing that we can communicate to the general student, as to the student of science. In a choice between teaching General Education students about the sciences and scientists, and teaching them about nature, I have do doubt that the latter is the deeper and more meaningful enterprise. Not that one needs to make a clean choice. All one needs is to choose the central theme. I would make that nature itself; yet the attempt to convey an integrated view of nature leaves large opportunities for discussing the history of science--even an occasional "case history"--philosophy, and a wide variety of relationships with the general culture.

Departmental Support

General Education should be just what it says--general, not exclusively special, education. To the degree that it involves interdepartmental or extra-departmental interests, one needs a General Education Committee to provide for it. To the degree also that some departments fail to provide an introductory course that stands on its own, that represents an elementary integration of the field and its relationships with other fields, the General Committee must attempt to arrange for such course. It is, however, no recommendation of an elementary General Education course that "departments will not support" it. If it is good General Education, then the more strongly a department supports it, the better. Indeed, one could wish for nothing better than that the departments increasingly take up the challenge of General Education.

All education now is a challenge, perhaps particularly in the sciences. It is not only that science is undergoing amazingly rapid development, in which twenty years is along time; but that the entire system of education in America is passing through an almost explosive revolution. The seat of that revolution is in the high schools, which have begun with increasing success to invade the early years of college instruction. Everything that we are doing is in flux and on the run, and will continue to be so for some time to come. A shock wave of greater and faster and deeper learning is passing through the whole system. It bit the elementary college courses a few years ago, and is now passing upward through the curriculum. Shortly it will bit the professional schools, and they two will have to revise their practices radically. This is no time to try to live by the book--any book. Our sanctions must lie elsewhere--in the pertinence and relevance and effectiveness of what we are doing. George Wald   Professor of Biology

Mr. COHEN comments: I could not concur more heartily in Professor Wald's hope that the attitudes of General Education are invading the departments. But the evidence is that Gen Ed has yet to establish a beachhead in the Introductory course offerings in mathematics, physics, and (excepting possibly Chem. 2) chemistry. Whatever the reasons for the absence of the Gen Ed spirit (e.g., the importance of graduate students, the highly formal substance of a field), funneling non-concentrators into an introductory course might bring about explicit discussion of the "relevance" of the field, and at the very least would assure all students of solid ground on which to build their ideas of the field's relevance, whether these ideas were then formulated privately or in a Gen Ed course assuming the introductory course as background.