General Ed

Slate takes on the issue of reforming the college "Core" or "General Education" curriculum. Their recipe is to ask a bunch of professors what they wanted, and the results were predictably diverse, ranging from the ultra-traditional, to the lame, to the trite, to the semi-interesting. For example, in the ultra-traditional category, my favorite was (S. Georgia Nugent who wrote:
What is the knowledge most worth having? In the Western tradition, sages have asked this question since the era of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, about 2000 B.C. One Egyptian magistrate declares, "It is to writings that you must set your mind. … There is nothing that surpasses writings! They are a boat upon the water. … I shall make you love books more than your mother." A thousand years later, a second Egyptian scribe provides a succinct curriculum: "Write with your hand, recite with your mouth, and converse with those more knowledgeable than you."


Check out the others at the Slate link above, but the only one that I really admired was Steven Pinker's. An excerpt:
General science education, often an afterthought, needs to be reconsidered, because scientific literacy is more important than ever. It's not just essential to being a competent citizen who can understand, for example, why hydrogen fuel cannot solve energy shortages, or that a child who swallows a pencil lead will not get lead poisoning. Science is also critical because it is blending with the other realms of human knowledge.

One example is deep history— the study of the peopling of the earth, the diversification of languages and cultures, and the transition from foraging to farming and civilization. Deep history, popularized by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, is unifying the timeline of biological evolution with the timeline of human history and culture. Another example is the sciences of human nature, such as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology. They are illuminating the mental processes that go into creating and appreciating art and that drive the social contracts underlying economic and political systems.
What the Greeks thought can be pretty interesting, but as Richard Dawkins wrote somewhere, everything written about the deep questions human nature before 1859 is mainly just of historical interest.

Comments

  1. Anonymous10:55 PM

    I didn't see any where else on your blog to point out that your comment left in the discussion about string theory was really, terribly funny. Nice job.

    "It’s nice that string theory “predicts” gravity, but in the old days only stuff we didn’t already know counted as predictions."

    ReplyDelete
  2. CapitalistImperialistPig6:39 AM

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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