Curricular Commons

The General Education Landscape

General education is a term widely used to describe university requirements that lie outside of a student’s professional or disciplinary concentration. The description of a well-rounded education that nurtures critical thinking and habits of lifelong learning, along with a degree of competency in communication and numeracy, contains the characteristics frequently emphasized as the raison d’être for general education curricular requirements that consume a fourth or more of baccalaureate education. References to global understanding, citizenship, moral grounding, and diversity also are common.

There are, however, substantial flaws in the notion that contemporary general education curricula and practices are sufficient to create good habits such as critical thinking and moral grounding that colleges and universities explicitly promise. “Habits are just habits, and those that require any effort tend to succumb to inertia in the absence of principle,” writes philosopher Susan Neiman. If students are to adopt meaningful principles and actions based upon enlightened understanding of the sciences and humanities, as well as excellence in communication and numeracy and full awareness of themselves and others, then it stands to reason that a purposeful curriculum relevant to the development of explicit intellectual outcomes is necessary to break the undisciplined decision-making habits that nearly all students bring with them to the university.

For many years, general education was intended to provide students not with a vague concept of menu-based breadth but, rather, with an explicit grounding in the liberal arts. John Stuart Mill suggested in 1859 that we look at “national education . . . as being, in truth, the peculiar training of a citizen, the practical part of the political education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns—habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another.” Mill’s work set a foundation for the general education and citizenship programs that emerged in the twentieth century.

Louis Menand, a Harvard professor of English and American literature and language, is adamant: “Knowledge is social memory, a connection to the past; and it is social hope, an investment in the future. The ability to create knowledge and put it to use is the adaptive characteristic of humans. It is how we reproduce ourselves as human beings and how we change—how we keep our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds.” Menand does not question the value of the disciplines and professions. Rather, the outcomes he describes speak to the need to bring context and salience to students equal to the understanding they develop within their major concentrations.

The recognition that undergraduate education should provide new knowledge and understanding is hardly limited to Menand’s optimistic tenets. “The dominant pedagogical aim,” democracy and law philosopher Ronald Dworkin wrote in 2006, “must be to instill some sense of the complexity of these issues, some understanding of positions different from those the students are likely to find at home or among friends, and some idea of what a conscientious and respectful argument over these issues might be like. The dominant pedagogical strategy should be an attempt to locate . . . [cultural, social, political, and scientific] controversies in different interpretations of principles the students might be expected themselves to accept: for example, the . . . principles of human dignity that I believe are common ground in America now.” For Dworkin, such an education is an imperative. “We cheat our children inexcusably if we allow the nation to continue only to masquerade as democratic,” he says.

The most common general education practices in the United States in the twenty-first century fall short of Dworkin’s call for contextual grounding and intellectual critical thinking. Often, the general education curriculum is both too broad and too narrow. It consists of a broad menu of lower-division introductory courses that meander across wide swaths of classes. It is too narrow in that general education courses often correspond to contracted faculty research interests or are taught as elementary disciplinary classes rather than...