Let’s be frank: who really likes Gen Eds? I don’t look at it as a series of educational opportunities, but a list of meaningless courses I need to check off in order to graduate. And I sincerely doubt that I’m alone in that sentiment.
In theory, the General Education Program seeks to help us students “become who you are” through a well-rounded education. Sounds pretty good, right? But somehow, I’ve almost finished my Gen Eds and can’t say the program has significantly changed who I am. And all but two of my classes have been useless or just downright bad.
From what I’ve experienced, making Gen Eds fit major requirements is a huge part of what makes the program unsuccessful. Getting students to “grapple” with ideas that challenge them is a great goal, but it isn’t always the same goal as an intro-level class.
I took Macroeconomics my freshman year, and found myself in a 300-person lecture that revolved around memorizing formulas for inflation and unemployment. No grappling there. It may be an effective way to teach the information to people who need to know it, but I gained nothing except a bad grade.
And when you mix major students and non-majors, the class can suffer. The professor can’t cut down on the amount of information presented because they’d screw over the people who need to know it, but half the class doesn’t need to know the facts. Plus, only a few people care enough to even do the reading, so discussion suffers.
Of course, there are exceptions. One of the only good Gen Eds I’ve taken was “The Experience of Poetry.” What made that class good was that it consisted of sitting around and really discussing poetry. There were no lectures on anapestic meter, but it was still challenging. The professor structured it so that everyone taking the course would leave with an appreciation for poetry. And for the most part, we did.
The University might be better off designing classes that are meant to be Gen Eds and focus on the goals of the program, not information. Science is a great example. Rather than filling the Gen Ed area straight lab science classes, why not offer classes that deal with how scientific understanding shapes society? That’s more likely to make me a well-educated person than calculating velocity.
The University needs to seriously reconsider what they want the Gen Ed Program to do. And fixing it won’t just take superficial changes like adding more classes or getting rid of the ridiculous cluster system.
To make the Gen Ed Program live up to its goals, the University needs to truly restructure how these classes are taught and how they fit into the big picture of our four years here. Maybe I have the wrong ideas on what needs to change, but to make this program worth its salt, something major does.
Emi Ruff-Wilkinson is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences and the winner of The Eagle’s Next Great Ranter contest.
