When I was an undergraduate student, I used to have endless debates with my academic adviser about ways of getting around the general education requirements at my institution. I mean, I was an international relations major with an interest in math and philosophy, so why should I be forced to take classes in art history or laboratory science? Like most clever undergrads, I tried all kinds of avenues to get out of those requirements, but I was unsuccessful.
In hindsight, I'm glad I was unsuccessful. Some of the most important courses of my undergraduate career were courses I took under duress, forced into them by the General Education Program.
In fact, I remember those courses and their material better than I remember most of my major classes. In part, that's because after going to graduate school in political science, I can no longer recall precisely which bits of my poli sci knowledge came from undergrad and which came from grad school. What is true of graduate school, I think, is equally true of the working world: Professional experiences after one's undergraduate days tend to replace some of the things one did while an undergraduate.
Contra Ms. Khazan's column from last week, I do not believe that the purpose of undergraduate education is to prepare students for the "real world," if by "real world" we mean that of professional work. Rather, undergraduate education is about helping students become who they are, by giving them opportunities to explore a variety of areas of human knowledge.
Times change, skills become outdated, even facts aren't immutable. If undergraduate education were about skills, it wouldn't be worth much, since your education would have a very short half-life.
Fortunately, that's not what undergraduate education is about. The point of taking classes in undergrad is to help you develop aptitudes and dispositions, to discover how various people and fields of study think about important issues. And in discovering how various people and fields of study approach these issues, you can craft yourself into a human being with a perspective on issues of ethics, aesthetics and culture. Not by accident, those form the program-wide goals of AU's General Education Program.
While I agree with Ms. Khazan that sitting in a room viewing slides is no substitute for seeing paintings in person, I can say beyond a doubt that sitting in a room viewing slides was what made it possible for me to understand and appreciate what I was seeing in person.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson Director of the Gen Ed Program
On Sept. 27, Jackson will host a discussion in the McDowell Formal Lounge on what it means to be a generally educated person and how AU helps students achieve that goal.
