It really depends university to university. My undergrad didn't really care which advanced humanities courses you took, as long as you took some of them.
Most universities I'm acquainted with have general introductory courses which are taken by all students (except for the sciences-which operate differently) followed by a handful of advanced courses in various disciplines. Berkeley's requirements for the College of Letters and Sciences is sort of typical, although I think the the University of Chicago is more balanced.
It's been assumed for a while that the purpose of college requirements was twofold, first to teach you basic life skills (critical thinking and whatnot), which is handled by the Core classes approximately equally, and the second is field-specific, handled by the upper division. So every department gets to fight over who gets to teach what, and who actually teaches those critical life skills (which mean big bucks).
It's not that schools are making you take a hefty load of lit courses, it was the reformist air I got out of the Slate essays that started all of this. A lot of them seemed to come to the conclusion that students were lacking in critical thinking skills, and the solution seemed to be that they had to toughen up the Liberal Arts curriculum for Core classes to fix this. My opinion is that if you only shore up one side of a collapsing house, it may be better than nothing, but not a lot better. Of course, they were mostly written by humanities professors, so you can expect a certain amount of native bias. Most of them would probably be astonished to find that I was interpreting their words as being weighted towards the Liberal Arts, which is why I'm accusing the bias of being subconscious.
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Date: 2005-12-03 07:03 pm (UTC)Most universities I'm acquainted with have general introductory courses which are taken by all students (except for the sciences-which operate differently) followed by a handful of advanced courses in various disciplines. Berkeley's requirements for the College of Letters and Sciences is sort of typical, although I think the the University of Chicago is more balanced.
It's been assumed for a while that the purpose of college requirements was twofold, first to teach you basic life skills (critical thinking and whatnot), which is handled by the Core classes approximately equally, and the second is field-specific, handled by the upper division. So every department gets to fight over who gets to teach what, and who actually teaches those critical life skills (which mean big bucks).
It's not that schools are making you take a hefty load of lit courses, it was the reformist air I got out of the Slate essays that started all of this. A lot of them seemed to come to the conclusion that students were lacking in critical thinking skills, and the solution seemed to be that they had to toughen up the Liberal Arts curriculum for Core classes to fix this. My opinion is that if you only shore up one side of a collapsing house, it may be better than nothing, but not a lot better. Of course, they were mostly written by humanities professors, so you can expect a certain amount of native bias. Most of them would probably be astonished to find that I was interpreting their words as being weighted towards the Liberal Arts, which is why I'm accusing the bias of being subconscious.