Harvard’s Gen Ed System Needs a Reboot

It’s time for Harvard’s General Education system to undergo real reform.

The General Education program, a supposed hallmark of Harvard’s vaunted liberal arts education, is meant to promote interdisciplinarity and real-world learning.

The value in such an approach is obvious: An interdisciplinary education forces students to venture forth from their most comfortable areas of study and learn something new. Encouraging all students — from the most STEM-oriented engineering geek to the English concentrator reading poetry in Barker cafe — to take courses outside of their major creates a student body that is more well rounded and better educated.

There’s a practical side, too: Pre-med students would benefit from rigorous writing classes, and pre-law students might gain much from understanding the basics of data analysis. As the lines between disciplines fray, well-rounded students will be better prepared for the future, regardless of their career.

Since 2019, students have been required to take four Gen Ed courses in different categories, one of which may be taken pass-fail.

Instead of focusing on how to better improve the content of such courses, the administration is bizarrely considering precluding students from fulfilling their General Education requirement with a course taken pass-fail.

While the pass-fail debate is worth consideration, it’s far from the most important issue the program faces.

Put simply, Gen Eds aren’t doing their job.

The current structure, under which four categories of Gen Ed courses exist, cannot hope to adequately encapsulate the breadth of knowledge that students can gain from an interdisciplinary education.

Rather than artificially dividing courses into one of four awkwardly chosen interdisciplinary categories, the Gen Program should focus on foundational disciplines: think English, math, history, or science. By requiring students to fulfill classes in each of these rudimentary fields, and by allowing divisional courses to fulfill the requirements — while still offering the current interdisciplinary Gen Ed courses as options to satisfy these criteria — the College can better promote a truly liberal arts education.

Doing so would also eliminate the confusion of managing the dual Gen Ed and distributional requirements, promoting a more cohesive educational experience.

Such an approach allows students to choose courses that genuinely interest them, fostering deeper engagement and learning. By broadening the paths to fulfill Gen Ed requirements, we encourage students to explore disciplines they might otherwise overlook.

Furthermore, rather than removing pass-fail options, as administrators have proposed, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences should recognize how pass-fail grading can incentivize students to take classes that have genuine intellectual appeal, rather than those that provide the most assured A. Take MIT, for example, where all first semester classes are graded on a pass-fail basis.

The decision to potentially curtail the pass-fail option is doubly confusing when weighed alongside last semester’s extension of the pass-fail deadline to the eleventh Monday of the semester.

Still, the removal or inclusion of one pass-fail option doesn’t doom or exalt the current system. Instead, Harvard should focus on reforming the General Education system to include real subject areas and methodologies, exposing students to different disciplines and combining the distributional requirements with Gen Eds.

By redefining our approach to General Education and embracing flexible grading, we can transform Harvard into a landscape where curiosity thrives. The future of our intellectual community depends on it.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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