What Should Students Learn?, Part 2
Continuing my discussion of the contents of a general education: Again, standard grade school education in the U.S. includes classes in gym, history, math, science, and English in every year from 6th to 12th grade. Many students also take foreign language classes to prepare for college. Last time, I complained about gym, foreign language, and history. This time, we turn to math, science, and English.
5. Math
Useful mathematics
There are two main reasons for studying a subject: the subject is practically useful, or the subject is theoretically interesting (it contributes to your general understanding of the world). Two previously-discussed subjects (gym and foreign language) have neither characteristic – they’re not useful, and they’re not theoretically interesting either.
Mathematics is different. Some understanding of mathematics is practically necessary, particularly basic arithmetic. (To belabor the obvious, an adult should be able to do stuff like plan their own budget for the month.) So everyone should learn that. Most mathematics above that is not practically useful to most people – unless you become an engineer or join some other technical profession, you will never use algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus.
Two other courses I think all or most students should have:
- Statistics, because people in public discourse are constantly appealing to (putative) statistical evidence. I would put special emphasis on fallacious reasoning using statistics.
- Financial mathematics. I have in mind teaching people about how interest rates and compound interest work, how investments work, standard wisdom about financial risk, and other lessons about financial planning. Because everyone in our society has to deal with money, and all or nearly all should do things like taking a mortgage, planning for retirement, etc.
Interesting mathematics
Everyone who graduates from college should know the basic concepts of differential and integral calculus. The reason is that calculus plays a central role in modern science. You can’t state any of the main laws of nature without calculus. Even the key principles of economics use calculus.
What’s wrong
So, what’s wrong with the status quo: you never learn statistics or financial math before college, but you’re usually required to learn some much less useful things instead. You might then learn statistics in college, but not necessarily. When you get to college, you generally have to learn some math, but not necessarily calculus – you could satisfy your math requirements by taking, say, formal logic or computer programming.
Why is it like this?
Grade school students have to take a math class every year. As best I can guess, the reason for this is that (i) it’s important for kids to learn arithmetic, and (ii) the adults who designed the curriculum were not very smart or reflective, so they inferred from (i) that students should study math in general. Once you’re done with arithmetic, therefore, it must be that you have to study whatever the “next” branch of mathematics is. Then maybe they talked to some mathematicians about what the next branches of math after arithmetic would be, and the mathematicians said, “algebra, geometry, trigonometry, then calculus.” Nobody thought about what would actually be useful to know.
In college, we have a general math requirement, to be satisfied by any math class, because the people who designed the curriculum were not thinking very hard about what was important to know. Maybe they remembered that they had to study math every year in grade school, so they inferred that “math” in general is one of the five main subject matters, and therefore college students should just learn some more math. To non-mathematicians, perhaps all mathy stuff seems pretty much the same, so it’s fine to take anything mathematical.
6. Science
Why should students learn science? Basically, because modern science helps us understand the nature of the world we live in. For instance, you should know that the Earth is in orbit around the sun, that material objects are made out of atoms, and that plants and animals evolved by natural selection. If you don’t know those sorts of things, then you just don’t know what’s going on in general.
My science education was the most satisfactory part of my schooling. I learned lots of things of that kind, I still know them, and they make up most of my understanding of the world. I don’t have any significant complaints about pre-college science education.
I have one complaint about college-level science requirements. They usually do not require any specific scientific knowledge to be taught; students can satisfy their college’s gen ed science requirement by taking courses in any science. This overlooks the fact that some sciences are more crucial to our worldview than others.
Why do we do it like this? Because the people who design curricula aren’t simply thinking about what students need to know to be generally educated. They’re thinking about how to satisfy the various factions in the university. If someone proposed modifying the science requirement to say that everyone must take specifically physics and evolutionary biology, the physics and biology professors would be happy, but the professors in all the other science departments would be furious. (The humanities and social science profs wouldn’t much care.) Since there are more people in other science departments than in physics + biology, the proposal would fail.
7. English
On its face, I find it strange that native English speakers should need to take a year-long course on English every year from 6th through 12th grade -- seven years on their native language -- and then another class or two in college. I’m also skeptical that any knowledge that wasn’t imparted during, say, the first five years of this instruction is going to be successfully conveyed during another three. If, for example, a student hasn’t learned to write a goddamned paper during five years of classes in grade school, I don’t think they’re going to learn it if you give them another three years.
Another one of my problems is that English professors seem to be incredibly terrible writers (to judge from their journals), so I don’t think they should be teaching anyone about writing.
Why do we have so much “English” instruction? My best guess: because (i) it’s important for children to learn to read and write, and (ii) the people who designed the curriculum weren’t very smart or reflective, so they inferred from (i) that students just need to study reading and writing in general. Therefore, even after you’ve learned to read and write, you should just study more reading and writing every year. Therefore, they created courses on literature – one year we’ll do English literature, then American literature, then world literature, etc.
But surely, you say, literature and the arts have contributed greatly to human culture, and everyone should have some familiarity with them? Being educated isn’t just about knowing the scientific worldview; it’s also about being cultured.
Problems
1. Why is literature the one art form that gets >7 years of required instruction, while no other art form is even required at all? Why do students have to study literature year after year, but never have to study music, sculpture, painting, film, architecture, or photography?
2. No doubt literature (or any other kind of art) is of great value to those who appreciate it. But can someone explain the value of force-feeding works of literature to people who find them completely boring and get nothing but suffering out of them? Because that’s the case for the overwhelming majority of students.
In case the theory is that by “exposing” students to literature, we introduce them to a lifelong source of entertainment and insight, that’s probably close to the opposite of the truth. What’s more likely is that by turning it into a chore that is forced upon them, you turn students off from literature.
The overwhelming majority of people will never like literature no matter what you do. For those few who might like it, their best bet is to be allowed to enjoy it without being forced to do tedious work every time they read it.
3. Can someone explain why almost all the cultural products students are exposed to need to be very old and/or from foreign societies?
If you were actually trying to expose students to things that they might enjoy and get something out of, wouldn’t it make more sense to pick the things that the most people in our society enjoy – i.e., highly popular pieces of literature, film, etc., from our present society – rather than the things that a tiny minority of effete intellectuals happen to like?
4. Finally, why, when you study a work of literature, are you forced to write essays about the most trivial, boring questions about it, and never permitted to discuss the actual central issues that that work raises? For instance, after reading Waiting for Godot, why do you have to talk about Samuel Beckett’s literary technique, rather than talking about whether God exists? Is the assumption that all Americans need to be trained for a future career as a professional novelist and/or literary critic?
[To be continued . . .]