What states get wrong when they mandate core college curriculum
Increasingly within the many news stories about the perceived and real failings of colleges today are laments about the fading content of the required general education or core courses to which college students should be exposed.
Traditionally college students are required to take a broad spectrum of introductory courses in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. Collectively these core courses are designed to give college students grounding in the essential skills that promote reasoned thought, compassion and understanding about the country in which they live and the world around them. The core represents the minimal knowledge with which a student should be familiar upon graduation.
The rationale for requiring a specific set of courses in the core is that collectively they offer a framework for reasoned thought. They should teach a student how to think, not what to think. They represent the shared values deemed essential to holding societies together.
Recent circumstances, global and otherwise, along with a deterioration in civility with which people and institutions conduct themselves, have suggested to many that young people are graduating college without the admirable skills gained by exposure to a solid core curriculum. The answer to many is to reinforce the essential components of a solid general education curriculum that many feel has lost its way.
As a result, some states are considering requiring a more defined content and rigorous set of general education courses that promote reasoned thinking and shared values. The most often cited as the reason for these curriculum revisions is that the introductory courses that make up the core sometimes mirror the interest of a particular faculty members and as a result focus upon extremely specific and contemporary topics that do
not represent the purpose of a general education curriculum. Instead, they focus only upon a few contemporary issues deemed important by a faculty member or considered fashionable by their discipline.
The contention is that these specialized courses do not provide the basic insights that will be useful throughout a student’s life. They narrow, instead of broadening a student’s thinking. While such specific topic oriented courses should still be taught, they would not be considered part of the core curriculum.
Conceptually, the idea of a state’s higher education board or commission pressing stateowned colleges and universities
to adopt a stricter cadre of core course is not necessarily problematic. Most faculty would likely agree that the core should provide a framework of reasoned thinking, cordial behavior and a commitment to the key characteristics deemed important for graduates to possess.
However, my experience in working in higher education for 40 years is that the incentives that drive many faculty are antithetical to dictates from above whether they come from commissions, higher education officials, governors or even their institution’s president.
Faculty hold allegiance to their disciplines. Within their individual departments there exists a strongly held belief that the
content should be decided upon by faculty because they have spent their lives honing their expertise in their fields. For this reason, faculty will balk at an agency telling what they should teach in “their classrooms.” This attitude is reinforced within their academic departments. On the other hand, faculty will mostly agree among themselves on 90% of the content of an introductory course, especially one that is part of the core curriculum.
Most faculty would agree that the idea of firming up the general education core curriculum and examining closely the introductory courses taught therein is a good one. However, pressing such changes down from above is not.
Instead, Florida and other
states considering firming up the general education curriculum should consider following the recommendations of the National Association of Scholars, a nonprofit organization that has, for years, upheld the standards of a liberal arts education by fostering intellectual freedom and honorable citizenship.
The association has developed a general education curriculum to be based in an existing or new college of general studies. It should oversee the general education curriculum, review courses taught there and evaluate the faculty that teaches those courses.