The Outward Look

Today the debate on General Education reaches the most critical point thus far; the Faculty must decide the future role of the Gen Ed course, Will the new program have a series of General Education courses at its core or will Gen Ed consist of a system of distribution requirements in which the Gen Ed course is optional? The decision is critical because a choice in favor of the distribution requirement would in effect signal an abnegation of Faculty responsibility.

I

The easiest arguments to make in defense of the required Gen Ed course are negative ones; the distribution plan would be no better, in fact worse, than a program with Gen Ed as the basic requisite. For example, some contend that without requiring Gen Ed courses the Faculty would have no desire to give these offerings and, when the courses atrophied, students would be denied even the option of taking them.

A less conjectural and more persuasive argument is to be made against the practical difficulty of implementing a distribution requirement. Such a system must allow the student to choose from either the totality of introductory departmental courses or from selected offerings to fulfill his requirements. But both positions are untenable.

Totality is bankrupt because it relieves the Faculty of any responsibility for Gen Ed and would allow students to evade requirements with inappropriate courses. Selectivity would be hard to effect for both political reasons--it would be ticklish business to shunt aside any department's introductory course--and philosophical ones--to exclude some courses and not others would involve establishing criteria for decision which no advocates of the distribution scheme are willing to set forth.

A third argument against a series of distribution requirements uses past experience to attack its underlying assumptions. Proponents of the plan believe, first, that students will seek a breadth of education without fiat, and, second, that faculty members will voluntarily give up departmental time to create and teach optional Gen Ed courses. But the recent history of Gen Ed shows that students who are not majoring in science simply do not take "hard" lab sciences voluntarily. Nor do professors in the scientific fields offer Gen Ed courses which would appeal to the non-concentrator. (There are virtually no upper level Gen Ed science courses.) There is no reason to believe that these problems, two of the most serious bedeviling Gen Ed, will be remedied by a distribution requirement.

II

But to many faculty members who are unsure which of the two alternatives they favor, negative arguments against a distribution requirement will not be sufficient. They want positive arguments which destroy the idea of a distribution requirement by showing 1. what qualities of the Gen Ed course must be preserved and 2. why these courses should be required.

Gen Ed courses should be preserved for the simple reason that they offer a means of attaining knowledge which is not available in the departmental structure. Over the past twenty years "general" has come to have three meanings with reference to courses.

* Inter-disciplinary--general in that it cuts across fields of knowledge. Such a course would, for example weave together history, literature and psychology.

* Methodological--general in that it examines the basic tools of a discipline. Such a course would explain the method for understanding the content of a field rather than the content of a field itself (for example, Hum 6) or would compare methodologies (e.g. Paul Tillich's course in philosophy and religion).

* Historical--general in the cultural themes that it discusses. Such a course combines various historical periods and various national styles.

But such courses are, on the lower level, "general" in another sense. They ideally should aim to introduce a student to the area of knowledge in which the course lies--Science, Social Science, or Humanities.

By introduce we mean that the Gen Ed course gives the student the tools and the perspective to structure future thinking and reading in the three broad areas of knowledge. These courses can and should give the student a limited but basic vocabulary which will encourage him to delve further into the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities and be able to organize his thoughts when he does so.

This vocabulary is not simply one of method or content because it must vary from field to field and even within fields. Sometimes method may be the key to organizing one's perceptions in an area of knowledge--as in science. Sometimes content is the key; an awareness of the historic themes of Western Civilization would both motivate and structure a student's future investigation into the Humanities. Sometimes method and content are clearly merged as in a Social Sciences course which combines the central disciplines of history, economics, and politics. And there are of course other examples. The point is not that there are many combinations of inter-disciplinary, methodological, and historical Gen Ed courses but that the aim of such courses is to open windows into a broad field of knowledge.

It is for this reason that a Gen Ed course may be differentiated from an introductory departmental course where goals are necessarily more limited. Of course some introductory departmental courses may have the same effect as a Gen Ed course and that is indeed why some have become Gen Ed courses. But these departmental courses are properly seen as a subset of the larger group of Gen Ed courses.

It is also because the Gen Ed course tries to introduce a student to an understanding and appreciation of a broad field of knowledge that it should be required. Gen Ed must look to the years after college when a man is a specialist, professional, or technocrat. It must train him for another role--nothing less than a citizen whose quality of mind can comprehend a pluralistic society.

No matter how assiduously he studies a man cannot leave the college with proficiency in a variety of departments. But he can leave with relative sophistication in his own department and the ability to appreciate other works outside the broad field of knowledge of which his field is a part. The role of the Gen Ed course (as opposed to the departmental course) is to produce this broadly appreciative man. In short, the generally educated man is distinguished not by what he knows but by his ability to comprehend and assimilate a broad (general if you will) range of material. This skill the Gen Ed course must teach.

Because it is the Faculty which must insure that students be given the outward look when fulfilling the Gen Ed requirement, and because both the assumptions and implementation of a distribution requirement are easily challenged, the Faculty should vote today to retain the Gen Ed course as the basis of Harvard's program of General Education.