Building Blocks

It seems obvious that there is no all-purpose ideal curriculum. I believe that students in a residential setting benefit by sharing at least a portion of the identical curriculum with one another and with capable and interested faculty members, in the hope that this would encourage a conversational and intellectual collegiality. I would wish that the contents of such a coherent program would vary in response to the interests of those faculty who are at once capable scholars (or creative artists in some medium) and teachers who are evocative with minimum hidden agendas, including crowd-pleasing. There are many great books, great inquiries, and great works that could be employed in building courses and endlessly reworking and rearranging them internally and in relation to each other. It seems fruitless to argue whether Aristotle is more important than Hobbes, Raphael than Vermeer, entropy than gravity. In choosing, it is important to think not only of what faculty are capable of teaching well, but of where students have been before they came, what their various subcultures on campus are and might develop into, and where diverse cohorts among them are headed. For any program to work well, students and faculty must be prepared to suspend disbelief in it, and sustain a certain level of intensity which will occassionally be joyful, more commonly effortful, even painful. Let us call whatever we conclude about this part of the curriculum General Education.

General Education is usually placed early in the undergraduate years. I would like to spread it through the four-year sequence, making sure that non-majors investigate an area close to the natural sciences and technology, and also an area close to the humanities and creative arts. I would like to propose in addition another kind of program, which would be extracurricular, but required, as sports used to be in the old days. The program would be a set of opportunities to acquire some marketable skill or craft. The occupational future appears cloudy at best, often frightening. Even the children of the affluent run scared before the incipient hazards. Perhaps a majority will be going on for post-baccalaureate further education, with their college years bent and often spent to insure themselves of entry into the most selective and presumably serviceable graduate and professional schools. A large and apparently somewhat increasing number will step out with the baccalaureate, and see whether they can get a job. If they have the security of a craft or skill, I think this would dampen the anxiety sufficiently so that students would feel free to pursue an education for a long lifetime rather than an education desperately tailored for the first working Monday after Commencement. It should be possible to set a period of time aside, for example, by having courses taught in a modular fashion, so that students could make their choices from a number of crafts, depending on their aptitudes and interests.

Summers would be a time also to try to perfect one's craft. However, the craft should be one which requires relatively little practice to renew one's skill, since it may come in handy not only before securing an entry-level position in one's hoped-for vocation, but at intervals of possible unemployment and change of jobs.

Of course, undergraduates should have a field of concentration. Concentrations (majors) at many colleges today amount to little more than distribution requirements within the subspecialities of discipline. At times, they are diluted sub-specialties. I think it important, as an aspect of General Education, for students to have courses taught by scholarly specialists who are enthusiastically engaged in work at the edge of the known. Again, I would be expediential concerning the subspecialties to which students are introduced, and not be too unhappy if in combination they do not cover what is now embraced within a concentration, let alone the almost boundless horizons of academic and intellectual cultures. Ideally, a colleague group in a department should be recruited as a team with an eye to a congeries of compatable subspecialties. Several members might take part in the General Education program as well as in helping create a less fragmented, inevitably more selective, field of concentration.

As early as possible in precollegiate education, in addition to whatever may be defined as basic subjects (wherein I would not include civics or social studies), students should learn at least one foreign language, and do work in one of the arts, and any lifelong sport. These activities should be continued throughout the undergraduate years--all will help deprovincialization.

David Riesman is Ford Professor of Social Sciences emeritus.