Can General Education Be General
D O MOST college students really want an education? With some reason, our answer may be "No." A degree, as the sine qua non of lucrative employment, exercises its magic attraction without illuminating the not necessarily lucrative but humanly desirable growth which should take place during the four or five years devoted to its pursuit. Hence, there is a strong student emphasis on the "cash value" of particular courses as they occur in orderly sequence on the path to that degree. General-education programs, in all their various manifestations, set themselves firmly athwart this current of student opinion. Devoted to the conviction that education implies certain skills and knowledge not necessarily related directly to slide rules and test tubes, to fugues and to strophes, these programs insist that, before the degree shall be stamped on the finished student, he needs proficiency in communicative skills, logical thinking, mathematical insight, scientific methcd-and understanding of humanities and the social and natural sciences. But, too often, the necessity for such an education does not appear with the same crystal clarity to the student as it does to his teachers-or at least to some of them. "Why do we have to bother with this stuff?" is the repeated question of Freshmen and Sophomores. "What's Renoir got to do with electronics? " To lay the blame for such an attitude on the student, and on his pre-collegiate training, may relieve professorial frustration. The towers of ivory are pierced these days by many gun ports through which ugly black muzzles fire shattering rounds of grape at the "educationists" who are alleged to have emasculated intellectual curiosity in their products. The graduate of the modern high school is said to enter college incapable of responding to academic challenge and completely unaware that such incapacity implies a weakness in his well-" adjusted" character. Such evasion, however, does not improve the college situation. Regardless of the cause, student reluctance is an anchor dragged by general education; would this reluctance be less if students were made aware of the relevance of educational objectives to their immediate activities? Two often-expressed objectives of general education are preparing the student to operate as an effective citizen in democratic society and giving the student an understanding of man's relationship to his world. Both are laudable, both should be constantly in the consciousness of every teacher, and both are often lost sight of as we ride individual hobbies