In his post, Hanson cites a Washington Post article focusing on the debate over core curricula at colleges, and whether they are better or worse than more self-guided approaches such as is found at Johns Hopkins University. The Post article writes:
Students at Johns Hopkins - and many other prestigious colleges - choose classes the way a diner patron assembles a meal, selecting items from a vast menu. Broad distribution requirements ensure that students explore the academic universe outside their majors. But no one is required to study any particular field, let alone take a specific course. Shakespeare, Plato, Euclid - all are on the menu; none is required.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based advocacy group, handed out F grades in August to Hopkins and many of its peers, inviting debate on a basic question: What, if anything, should America's college students be required to learn?
The group faulted the schools, including Yale, Brown, Cornell, Amherst and the University of California at Berkeley, for failing to require students to take courses in more than one of seven core academic subjects: math, science, history, economics, foreign language, literature and composition.
"At Stanford, you can fulfill the American cultures requirement by taking a class on a Japanese drum," said Anne Neal, president of the trustees group.
"We're certainly not saying that Harvard or Hopkins or Yale are not good schools, or that their graduates are not smart kids," said Neal, who attended Harvard and Harvard Law. "What we're saying is that those schools don't do a good job at providing their students with a coherent core."
Some higher education leaders say Neal misses the mark. The point of a college education is to teach students to think, solve problems and change the world, they say, not to download a compendium of facts.I pay particular attention to the final paragraph, which cuts to the core of the debate. We've focused for decades now on putting college degrees into more people's hands (we've succeeded), assuming that these degrees will turn them into more capable workers, more prepared to add value to the economy and world at large.
Lately--and especially since our current recession took hold--that assumption seems to be coming under more scrutiny. What we need now more than ever is for creativity and entrepreneurship to lead us out of our economic doldrums, instead of continuing to rely on our largest companies to hire more people.
Unfortunately, we've been educating against that need for decades. Instead of encouraging and inspiring creative thought and non-traditional teaching/learning methods, we've created a generation of worker bees with standardized skill sets--essentially, interchangeable parts within the mechanisms of our largest companies. Hanson writes (emphasis mine),
Whence this urge to make college students all take the same “core” classes? It might be paternalism re the intellectual health of the students. But if so, why only require this core of college students; why not make everyone take it? Why expect students to underestimate the benefit of core classes, even after they’ve heard your arguments for such classes? And why do advocates seem much less interested in which classes are in the core than that there be a common core?
Another theory is that students neglect being innovative because they don’t get all of its benefits, and people innovate more when they learn more than just one narrow field. But the usual breadth requirements seem sufficient for that purpose – people taking a variety of different breadth classes betters encourages finding unusual connections between fields. And we see little interest in encouraging people to know two fields in depth, which would seem to help cross-field connections the most.
A related theory is that a common core enables better communication between specialists in different areas. But again, this seems better encouraged by lots of diverse overlaps, and especially by people who know two fields in depth, than by everyone taking the same common core. Also, why not make non-college folks do this, and why don’t those who talk internalize gains from better communication?
An important clue here is that a burst of immigration coincided with an increased perceived need for a common core. So perhaps insiders wanted the core to create a stronger clearer contrast between “us” and “them.” One possibility is that people really wanted to push a certain package of “our” course content, in order to change immigrants from “them” into “us.” Under this theory, apparent advocate disinterest in core content is deceptive; they were confident that if we picked a standard core it would have the content they wanted.Interesting stuff. Hanson does a good job of making it clear that "the issues" as they are presented by politicians and pundits are rarely independent and isolable. Immigration, education, and our economy are co-related problems, and cannot be solved piecemeal. Rather, we need a wholistic approach to our society (and its issues), and a recognition that our economy cannot be saved as long as we have incoherent policies on immigration and education--or worse, policies in these arenas that actually work at odds with each other.
I don't think that we'll be coming up with a coherent immigration policy any time soon (which upsets me), but I do think there's hope for fixing our education system. The first step will be recognizing that not all students need to be or should be educated in the same manner. Forcing students to study core curricula at the exclusion of other subjects that they are more interested in benefits nobody; pretending it does is foolhardy.
[Overcoming Bias]
[Washington Post]
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