What Should Students Learn?, Part 3
Continuing my discussion of the contents of a general education: In the last two posts, I complained about gym, foreign language, history, math, science, and English education. This time, we turn to cultural diversity requirements, then the things that should be but aren’t included in general education, such as philosophy and economics. But first …
8. Interlude: How could I hate school?
I hated most of my schooling before college. That fact should really give any American educator pause.
I was at or near the top of every class. I would ultimately became a successful professor, with scores of academic articles and seven books. I’ve also worked on a broad range of topics, much broader than almost anyone else in the academy, including traditional humanities topics, topics that are closer to social science, and topics that are closer to mathematics and natural science. I’m more intellectually skilled and engaged than at least 99.99% of humans, and I am myself an educator. Therefore, by all rights I should be expected to have loved school, if anyone should. If even I didn’t enjoy it, and even I can’t see the point of most of it, then the overwhelming majority of students are probably getting approximately nothing out of it.
Part of what I didn’t like was the lack of freedom. You were never studying what you wanted to study. You were always being forced to study some thing that someone else came up with, for no clear reason, or you’d be given reasons that were obvious rationalizations, as mentioned above. The chosen topics often weren’t either useful or interesting at all – like the rules of baseball, or a list of words in a foreign language along with their English translations, or a series of names and dates. If you tried to talk about something interesting and important, like the existence of God, or free will, or the origin of the universe, you’d be immediately shut down.
9. Diversity
“Diversity” requirements started to appear when I was in college and have spread since then. They’re basically an effort to indoctrinate students into Woke/SJW ideology.
Of course, they are not explicitly billed as such. They’re said to be requirements that familiarize students with cultural diversity or the diversity of human experience, which actually sounds like a valuable part of a general education. But in actual fact, SJW ideology courses are heavily represented in the courses that satisfy these requirements – courses on feminism, racism, and the like – and that was absolutely expected by everyone from the start.
Some people might be tricked into thinking that these aren’t ideologically biased requirements because one can state a superficially non-ideological rationale for why it’s good to learn about human diversity, and because the requirements don’t say that the courses have to treat their subject with a left-wing viewpoint (there could be a conservative take on diversity, after all).
A useful comparison is to imagine someone proposing a new curricular requirement to be called the Liberty Requirement, which would be satisfied by courses that highlight the perennial human struggle for liberty and against government tyranny. This would obviously be a libertarian-oriented requirement, whether or not the proposer explicitly said that and whether or not the requirement actually said the courses had to be pro liberty. It would get approximately zero support from non-libertarian faculty, which would be another way that we could know (if it wasn’t immediately obvious on its face) that it was an ideologically biased proposal.
Or imagine someone proposing a new God and Tradition Requirement, to be satisfied by courses on mankind’s perennial drive to understand God and to preserve traditions. This would obviously be a conservative-biased requirement, whether or not it explicitly said that the courses should be pro-God or pro-tradition. Again, approximately 0 non-conservatives would support it.
That’s how it is with the “diversity” requirements. They’re obviously left-wing ideological requirements, and no one who isn’t a leftist has the slightest trouble seeing that. Approximately 0% of non-leftists support these requirements, but they are widespread in American colleges and universities because leftists have completely taken over the institutions and they have no shame whatsoever about naked ideological impositions.
Having a requirement like this is tantamount to the university declaring an official political ideology (which nearly every university in America does, and it’s always the same one).
10. Philosophy
I’ve now listed a bunch of things that shouldn’t be in the standard curriculum. Now for what should be: philosophy, of course. If any subject should be part of a general education, it’s philosophy.
I’m not just saying that to create more jobs for philosophers! General education should be, again, partly about getting a general understanding of the world that we live in. Philosophy pursues that more explicitly than any other subject. It explores the largest, most fundamental, and most theoretically interesting questions.
Of course, not all that goes by the name of “philosophy” does that. Everyone doesn’t need to study Kaplan’s theory of indexicals in order to be generally educated. But everyone should have reflected seriously on such topics as God, free will, justice, and the nature of the good. This just seems so obvious to me that I’m not sure what to say in support of it, and I’m confused as to why everyone doesn’t acknowledge this already.
11. Economics
Knowledge of economics should also be widespread. This is perhaps the one area of knowledge that is most often relevant and helpful for public policy discussions. It’s also a subject on which almost everyone is more or less born with completely confused prejudices, which people tend to hold with near-total certainty. Once you learn some economics, you see through a lot of the nonsense. But hardly anyone in our society ever actually learns any economics. As a result, the vast majority of voters, including people who are otherwise well-educated, enthusiastically support policies that are demonstrably counter-productive or otherwise dumb, such as price controls and trade barriers.
12. Electives
Another thing that should be a bigger part of education: electives. Before college, students have almost no choice in what they study. That’s a large part of why, I assume, most students are unhappy with school. It stands to reason that if they get to choose the topics, students are going to be more satisfied.
Objection: “Students don’t know what’s important! The purpose of education isn’t to make students happy; it’s to make them know the things that are objectively important.”
Reply:
1. The people designing curricula don’t seem to know what’s important, any better than the students do. See above.
2. It’s also important that students learn the material that they’re studying well, whatever it is. And that is simply much more likely to happen if they get to choose what to study.
Now, there are some things that everyone really needs to know about – like reading and writing, arithmetic, basic science, and philosophy. But beyond these core topics (and you don’t have to study these topics over and over again, every year), students should get to choose what they learn, from the widest feasible range of topics.
* * *
My suggestions, taken together, would entail a pretty radical revision of our education system. No one with any influence is going to take them seriously, of course, because they would require laying off lots of existing teachers who are invested in the status quo (teachers of English, French, etc.), and then somewhere finding lots of new teachers for all the philosophy and economics classes. That means that existing teachers would be outraged by my proposals, and of course they’re the ones with influence on the education system. So my radical revision is a non-starter, politically. But it’s what we would do if we just cared about the good of students.