5.15.2011

My So-Called Education?

Finals are fast approaching, and that means one thing: more procrastination, more Netflix, and more internet surfing. Just kidding, Mom.

While doing so, I did come across this article, which rehashes an idea that has been floating around the ideosphere for a while: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=1

First of all, a snarkier title there could not be. My “so-called education”? NYtimes, you don’t know my life.

It’s interesting to think about this from an English major’s point of view, however. Whenever I’ve been told that my major isn’t “real”, whatever that means, the critic usually points to the fact that my classwork isn’t quantifiable. I can’t hold up x number of problem sets and say, “Look, I’m a big girl now!” Instead all I have are papers that most people don’t necessarily find interesting (unless they really care about The Canterbury Tales, I guess, or maybe whether anthropomorphism can ever be anything but anthropocentric. Did I lose you?)

My major requirements are, to many people, disconcertingly vague (take at least one class focused on British literature and one class centered on the study of poetry, etc.) while math and science majors have reassuring sequences. In other majors, there is a way of definitely knowing whether you are “better” than someone else. Answers are usually right or wrong (NOT, for example, “a good start but perhaps if you delved deeper into ways in which Chaucer problematizes the ethos of pure violence, you might arrive at a clearer analysis…”). You can turn to someone and say, “I’m in Math 203”, which is by most standards definitively higher and harder than Math 202. Whereas someone in “Chinese Literature of the 20th Century” can’t say they’ve advanced beyond someone in “Reading and Roadtripping”

The NYtimes article raises the possibility that students use their four (more or less) precious undergrad years just generally dicking around and not learning anything. The assertion that there are people who only spend 12 hours on schoolwork a week is, I’m sure, shocking to us UChicago students who live in the Reg. People can take courses with less than 40 pages of reading a week?

Some of us are fortunate enough to go to colleges that still prize academics over fancy amenities. I, for example, read almost 300 pages a week and live in a building with rats and no air-conditioning. I’m sure many of my friends would agree that at least here at the U of C, there’s no lack of academic rigor. Yet.

However, the article does raise some pertinent questions, even for our hallowed institution. The point about teacher evaluations is, for example, quite relevant. A friend of mine has raged more than once about the flaws in the teacher evaluation system, which includes questions designed to steer students towards easier classes with less work. Practically speaking, most students do pay attention to those qualifications—but this system still, as NYtimes puts it, creates “incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades”.

The core at this University (and at other universities) raises other concerns. I have certainly felt like my time was being wasted as I sat in a physical sciences class, along with about a hundred other students, learning that water comes in three phases. (No joke, this information was actually presented as part of a lecture.) Is it really necessary to force students to take both humanities and social sciences, civilization studies, biology, and physical sciences? I understand the argument that familiarity with some thinkers (Marx, Smith, Foucault, etc.) is considered necessary to get on as an intellectual in this world. But is Core Biology really going to be useful to an English major? Or an Economics major, for that matter? Core classes do not explore the depth necessary to really know a subject, and they rarely cover ground that is truly new and exciting. Instead, they skim the surface of an impossibly broad topic, forcing students to do a lot of busy-work in exchange for little real learning. And yes, even non-writing-based majors should know how to craft a well-argued paper, but does that really require seven quarters of humanities, social sciences, and civ? It seems that time could be better spent learning more relevant information, or taking more focused classes.

What do you think? Are you actually learning anything at college? (Hopefully you’re learning something…)

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