5 Toward a New General Education Model

In The Meaning of General Education, I defined general education this way:

General education is a comprehensive, self-consciously developed and maintained program that develops in individual students the attitude of inquiry; the skills of problem solving; the individual and community values associated with a democratic society; and the knowledge needed to apply those attitudes, skills, and values so that the students may maintain the learning process over a lifetime and function as self-fulfilled individuals and as full participants in a society committed to change through democratic processes.  As such, it is marked by its comprehensive scope, by is emphasis on specific and real problems and issues of immediate concern to students and society, by its concern with the needs of the future, and by the application of democratic principles in the methods and procedures of education as well as the goals of education (1988, p. 5).

I also wrote that General Education is not synonymous with “liberal education.”  That said, however, there are opportunities for curricula that contain elements of both general and liberal education and that might serve both interests within a curriculum.  Michael S. Roth, for instance, defines liberal education as “the combination of the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of how one learns as a whole person” (p. 4).  “Liberal education,” he writes, “intertwines the philosophical and rhetorical so that we learn how to learn, so that we continue both inquiry and cultural participation throughout our lives because learning has become part of who we are” (ibid.).  In a society increasingly driven by information and technological innovation that affects all corners of social and personal life, the skills that Roth describes are necessary for effective citizenship and so should be considered in developing a general education curriculum.   The need is for a curriculum that is focused on the student and the world in which the student lives, that references the past in order to prepare the student to live in the present and to shape the future.

How, then, do we define a general education curriculum in the global information society?

Christopher Beha, editor of Harper’s magazine, wrote that what makes the job of editing a magazine like Harper’s a challenge in today’s environment is “the need to constantly ask ourselves what will matter to readers months and even years from now” (Beha, 2020, p. 4). The same could be said of educators at all levels, but especially those involved in general education.  Most courses in a student’s major can be justified by their direct application to the profession for which the student is preparing.  General education, on the other hand, is just that—general.  At one time, one might have argued that general education was specific in that it provided the core knowledge that defined western civilization. Today, however, we no longer live in western civilization, but in a highly interconnected global society. We should ask, “what will matter to students months and even years from now?” as they make their way into an increasingly global, technological society marked by accelerating change.

One might argue that some things—the canon of Western civilization, for instance—have not changed.  However, while some things have not changed, others have.  There are many reasons why education today has become so focused on material benefits–on preparing people for work.  Not the least is that we no longer live in a world of nation states, but instead in a global economy where technology has eliminated many geographic boundaries, so that competition for talent has never been greater. American society needs a better trained workforce in order to compete for jobs at all levels. That said, if Hutchins was correct that every act must be judged as a moral act, not an economic act, then we must also prepare our citizens for moral action in the increasingly complex culture in which the new work takes place.  How do we use the lessons of the past to inform present and future actions?  How do we educate people so that they can maintain a free and open society in the midst of accelerating change?

A first step is to free the general education curriculum from the discipline-centered “breadth and depth” distribution model that was adopted early in the Industrial Revolution.  Over the decades, that system has come to be focused more on how the academic community supports itself—academic departments generate funds to support faculty and teaching assistants–and less on how the world itself works.   It should be replaced with a highly interdisciplinary problem-centered curriculum that brings history, philosophy, and the social and physical sciences to bear on understanding the nature of today’s society and the role of the individual in that society.  This curriculum must begin with a clear sense of purpose.  As Dewey suggested, it must use the experiences of the past and contextualize them around current problems to give students the ability to direct the course of their own subsequent experience.

A second step is to free general education from the first two years of undergraduate education and incorporate the social and, to use Hutchins’ phrase, moral purpose of the general education curriculum into the professional curriculum.  This can be done through research projects and problem-centered capstone experiences that require students to explore the social and moral implications of their new professional knowledge on the community around them, resulting in a “sandwich” general education program that provides a context both for citizenship and for the student’s chosen profession.

For public institutions–land grant universities, state colleges and universities, community colleges–and private institutions that accept state/federal financial aid, the key step is to recognize our continuing obligation not only to individuals and their future employers, but to citizens in general, who have invested, through their taxes, in the institution’s mission.  Otherwise, the concerns of Hutchins and Dewey–that democracy will succumb to materialism–may well prove true.

General Education must prepare students to be effective citizens of a global information society in both their personal and professional lives.  This new, problem-centered approach should be rooted in several elements:

• • Contextualized Knowledge– The goal should be to convey the cultural foundations of civil society in a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates history, philosophy, and social change to give students a grounding in the cultural traditions and forces of change affecting societies around the world.
  • Problem-Solving Skills– At one time, the skills section of a general education program focused on communications—public speaking and writing, especially.  In today’s global information society, critical citizenship skills must include how to find and evaluate information, problem-solving, collaboration, and inter-cultural understanding.  These, in turn, require an active learning environment in which students work, individually and together, to locate and evaluate information, turn it into knowledge, and apply the resulting knowledge to solve problems.  Communications skills—including speaking and writing—remain important and can be addressed within the active learning context.
  • Attitudes– This includes understanding the role of globalization in shaping one’s identity and understanding one’s role as an individual in family, local community, national, and global contexts. It is in this area that the curriculum develops the student’s predisposition to act in different environments.  This area should also serve to address racial and cultural stereotypes that limit the student’s ability to see herself as part of a broader community.
  • Experience—Just as the Industrial Revolution stimulated the inclusion of laboratory courses to help students understand the scientific process and the standards of scientific research, the global Information Society requires that students gain direct experience in with different kinds of communities.  This can be accomplished through simulations, local internships, service-focused study abroad opportunities, or projects that bring together multicultural student teams to explore social issues and find solutions to problems.  This could also be the focus of a capstone course for professional programs.
  • Collaboration – This is the ability of a student to work with other students—in the classroom, in the community, and, through technology, at other institutions—and with professionals in a range of fields to creatively find, evaluate, and apply information to solve problems.

Developing Foundational Skills

In many ways, the Information Revolution can also be described as the Communications Revolution.  Increasingly, written communication is how we convey ideas to family and friends and to professional colleagues around the world.  The Web has also opened new vistas for live verbal interaction through webinars and other synchronous communications as well as recorded speaking events on U-Tube.  As a result, it is essential that a general education curriculum include courses in writing—both academic and general—and public presentation.  They are more important than ever to the ability of a graduate to succeed professionally and as a citizen.

At the same time, however, the Information Revolution has made it critical that citizens be able to evaluate information and discern between facts and the many variations of “spin” that people use to sell ideas.  Related to this is the need to identify sources of information and to validate what is posted when the source is not clear.  In this environment, information evaluation becomes essential for both citizenship and professional life.  It should be integrated into every course and major, so that students learn to be good judges of information in many different contexts.

The general education curriculum should also incorporate the technology that drives both professional and personal life—wikis, blogs, online social networking, etc.—so that students develop a sense of the effective and ethical uses of these technologies.

General Education and STEM

The role of the physical and biological sciences in a general education program is a knotty issue for curriculum planners.  On one hand, higher education has become sensitized to the need for graduates to have a better foundation in disciplines that contribute to an understanding of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—the STEM skills that are increasingly needed in today’s workplace.  On the other hand, the current distribution curriculum—which typically allows students to meet their general education requirements by taking basic introductory courses in math and various science and social science disciplines—often fails to prepare students for advanced study in these disciplines or to develop knowledge and skills that allow them to makes more effective decisions in these arenas as citizens in a technology-oriented society.  In fact, many students are able to avoid taking these courses because they simply duplicate materials learned in high school.

Institutions are thus faced with two curricular issues: (1) how to prepare students with the scientific knowledge and skills needed to be successful in more advanced courses in the science disciplines and (2) how to prepare students to be effective citizens and consumers of scientific knowledge in a technological information society.  Both are important to the undergraduate curriculum, but it is the second issue that is essential for how an institution defines general education.

Historian and biographer Walter Isaacson noted that Albert Einstein conceived many of his breakthroughs in quantum physics first as “thought experiments”—simple situations that demonstrate the impact of a scientific truth and stimulate creative visioning.  Isaacson noted that “A popular feel for science should, if possible, be restored, given the needs of the twenty-first century,” adding:

We should teach it as a creative endeavor, involving visual and imaginative thinking, rather than as the crunching of numbers and the memorization of laws.  More broadly, we should embrace as a society an appreciation for the beauty and creativity of science.  What science teaches us, very importantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein’s life” (Isaacson, American Sketches, p. 148).

One model for achieving this goal is the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement.  Wikipedia defines STS as “the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture” (Science and Technology Studies, Wikipedia, para 1).   Harvard University notes that STS merges two kinds of scholarship:

The first consists of research on the nature and practices of science and technology (S&T). Studies in this genre approach S&T as social institutions possessing distinctive structures, commitments, practices, and discourses that vary across cultures and change over time. This line of work addresses questions like the following: is there a scientific method; what makes scientific facts credible; how do new disciplines emerge; and how does science relate to religion?  The second stream concerns itself more with the impacts and control of science and technology, with particular focus on the risks that S&T may pose to peace, security, community, democracy, environmental sustainability, and human values. Driving this body of research are questions like the following: how should states set priorities for research funding; who should participate, and how, in technological decision-making; should life forms be patented; how should societies measure risks and set safety standards; and how should experts communicate the reasons for their judgments to the public?  (Harvard University. What is STS, para. 2).

STS teaching, notes the Harvard website, “seeks to promote cross-disciplinary integration, civic engagement, and critical thinking” (ibid.)   Stanford University, which maintains a major in STS, describes it as “liberal arts for the 21st century: an ideal preparation for life in a world constantly being shaped and reshaped by science, technology, and medicine” (Stanford University. “What is STS?” para. 5).  An STS element of General Education could bring together both the hard sciences and the social sciences around specific societal and/or scientific issues to help students learn how to address problems in society.

General Education in Mathematics  Most students coming into college will already have had experience with algebra, geometry, and, perhaps, a bit of calculus.  If they need additional math for their chosen major, they should be able to get it.  However, for the purposes of general education—what all students need in order to be effective as citizens—a course on statistics may be the most valuable experience.  It is essential that citizens be able to read and understand statistics in order to make good decisions as citizens and as professionals.

The Social Sciences

The distribution model typically gives students several options in this area—introductory courses in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, for instance.  A new general education approach might better focus student attention on the ways different communities are organized and what members of those communities need to know in order to solve problems.  An example is the “Problems of Democracy” theme, which, first, builds an understanding of how our democracy is structured—the Constitution—and then how the rules of democracy as defined by our laws and culture should be used to solve current problems.

The Humanities  

Defining the role of the humanities may be one of the most difficult parts of designing a general education curriculum, for the humanities have played differing roles in the undergraduate curriculum over the years.  Originally, of course, the humanities were the foundation of the liberal arts curriculum.  Over the past few decades, however, the humanities have seen rough times.  As the demand for humanities graduates has declined, so has the central role of humanism in the curriculum.  At the same time, the institution’s role in teaching the humanities has declined as institutions increasingly encourage the transfer of credits from high school and community college curricula to meet general education requirements.

That said, institutions recently have made some interesting experiments that may point the way.  For instance, in October 2015, Tania Lombrozo wrote about two University of California-Berkeley faculty who offer the humanities as a way to “open our eyes to the distinctive ways that people in different places and in different times, in different cultures and in different groups, have imagined what it means to be human” (Lombrozo, para 4).  Their interdisciplinary approach “is the study of the different ways that human beings have chosen or been able to live their lives as human beings” (ibid., para 3).

What, then, should be the role of the humanities in general education?  As the Berkeley innovation suggests, the answer lies, in part at least, in positioning humanities studies to help students understand how people perceive what it means to be human—to live in a human community in particular times and particular places.  At the same time, we need to acknowledge that, in the global information society, the experience of ancient Greece is no longer the sole source of inspiration.  We no longer live within a culture defined solely by the traditions of western civilization, but in a diverse global society.  The goal of the humanities in the general education curriculum must be to prepare students to live in a multi-cultural global society in which the actions of individuals are shaped by and connected to the community by technology.

As with other parts of the curriculum, the humanities component should reflect and advance the institution’s own mission.  That said, several key elements should be present:  the program should be problem-centered, with a problem statement providing a context for reading key documents; the program should be inquiry-oriented, giving students an opportunity to explore documents to find ideas that can be used to address the problem; and the program should be interdisciplinary, allowing students to see the issue of multiple perspectives (i.e., historical, philosophical, social).

Fresh Approaches to the Structure of General Education

A Sandwich Curriculum

At most institutions, general education is contained within the first 30-36 credits of a 120-credit baccalaureate program.  The nature of the Information Society, however, suggests that some general education issues are more properly addressed as the student digs deeper into her professional curriculum.  One solution would be to move toward a “sandwich” general education curriculum in which general courses are sandwiched around the student’s major/professional curriculum.  The first part would develop the student’s understanding of the social implications of key concepts in the sciences and humanities, along with critical communications skills.  Students would then move to their professional studies.  The final general education component—the top of the sandwich—would be during the student’s senior year, when interdisciplinary capstone courses put their professional studies into the context of life in a global information society.  The goal of this capstone general education, which could be tied to an internship or practicum, would be to ensure that individuals enter the workforce with an understanding of ethics, cultural understanding and communications, and the societal implications of their profession.

General Education and Lifelong Learning  

Tom Friedman has observed that, while in the past a baccalaureate degree prepared a student for a profession, in the Information Age, it simply prepares one for that first job.  Lifelong learning has emerged as a necessity in this new era.  I would argue that this applies not just to professional education, but to general education as well.  As graduates move into their professions, they take on new responsibilities as parents, as members of new communities, and as leaders in their professions.  General education as described above should be a part of the continuing education of professionals to help them through the various roles they will play in their communities and, ultimately, to help them prepare for the third act—a fulfilling retirement.  Micro-credentials may prove to be an effective vehicle for this part of the general education curriculum.

Conclusion

General education has an important role to play in preparing students for careers and for citizenship in a world increasingly defined by our use of information technology.  Much has changed in undergraduate education—and in society, generally—since the general education experiments that Dewey, Meiklejohn, Hutchins, and others led in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Today, two decades into the 21st century, we know that the world is no longer divided into isolated civilizations.  Technology and trade have created a global economy and, increasingly, a global culture—one in which we can still celebrate our roots but must also be able to work across cultures in order to succeed in a profession and to play a role in the success of our culture itself.  When we study the past, the purpose is to better navigate the present and create a viable future.  The current resurgence of white supremacy and the tendency toward a politics of autocracy demonstrate the failure of the old model in this new environment.

Many are equating the current phase of the Information Revolution with a Fourth Industrial Revolution—one that began with the spread of computers in the 20th century and that, today, according to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, “. . . is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres” (Schwab, para 2).

General education is not about the past, although the past may provide an opportunity to think about today’s problems and culture.  Nor is it about the traditional disciplines, although we can use those tools to structure a learning experience.  General education is about preparing students to be effective citizens in a rapidly changing, increasingly globalized culture.  General education prepares students with cultural and scientific insight and problem-solving skills that they can carry into their professional studies and into their social and private lives.

Changing general education will not be easy.  At many institutions in which the distribution model persists, general education courses have been built into the annual budgets and cultures of academic units, helping to justify graduate assistantships.  That said, change outside the academic budget is happening rapidly.  The new K-14 movement—which promises to provide access to the first two years of undergraduate education at no cost to the student—is gathering interest and may well be a catalyst in the decade ahead for creative re-invention of an institution’s general education curriculum.

Now is the time to begin the complex process of re-inventing this important element of American higher education so that our institutions may effective prepare their students for life in this emerging society.