THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609050023
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 56 lines
Back to school means college too, and interesting and encouraging changes are afoot on several Virginia campuses. Whether described as general education or a core curriculum, what's at issue is the college courses that every student is expected to take before getting immersed in a specialty.
Back in the '60s, students made a habit of telling their schools what they ought to be taught. Too often, pliant faculties and cowed administrations pared back required courses to a bare minimum.
Not surprisingly, the graduates of this era were spottily educated. A return to greater rigor from kindergarten to graduate school is now having a counterrevolutionary effect on general education.
In a recent report, Pilot staff writer Phil Walzer provided a look at plans by William and Mary, Old Dominion University and James Madison to beef up required courses.
Once, William and Mary let students give math a pass. Now one math and two science classes will be required. At ODU, a second writing class and a third science course will be added. James Madison is reducing choices which is another way of saying that exposure to required topics will become more assured.
In an echo of the do-your-own-thing era, there's been some protest by students at losing freedom. But college education is only in part about controlling your own destiny. It ought also to be about mastering a body of shared information we call culture.
The canon may keep changing, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be one. It is impossible to be an educated member of a society without shared knowledge of a certain minimum store of cultural milestones.
So colleges and universities are right to insist that students get a brisk canter through Western literature, art and history, basic science, math and social-science concepts and the rudiments of a second language.
Norfolk State will begin insisting this year on computer skills and that's on ODU's future agenda as well. Makes sense. The new U.Va. requirement of a course in non-Western perspectives and William and Mary's requirement of world culture and history are also wise additions in a world where the globe shrinks.
Interestingly, none of the schools surveyed makes a specific requirement that students study economics or government, yet those disciplines concern the waters in which we all must swim.
As long ago as 1948, the polymathic poet and novelist Robert Graves made a tart and persuasive case for general learning in an increasingly specialized world. He said, ``To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common. . . .''
The curriculum revisions at Virginia colleges and universities suggest they are catching up with Graves after almost 50 years. Good. There may be hope for civilization, after all. by CNB