Word: generality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Columbia's old argument for a common base of knowledge also comes up in current discussions of general education. John Perry, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stanford University and head of a committee instituting a new program there, says, "Since the end of the war, Stanford professors have had to water down their advanced courses to explain material they used to be able to assume students understood." David Riesman, Ford Professor of Social Sciences, adds that a common intellectual experience enables students to learn more from each other. Under Gen Ed, he says, "the chance is minimal that...
...Modern general education saw its real start in 1919 when the Columbia College faculty instituted a required course in Contemporary Civilization, sometimes referred to by current students as "philosopher of the week." Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago from 1929 into the '50s, started a more ambitious program, a four-year, totally prescribed, liberal arts curriculum to fight what he once called "the peculiar brutality and aggressive stupidity with which a man comports himself when he knows a great deal about one thing and is totally ignorant of the rest." Like Columbia, Chicago wanted its students...
Although Harvard's General Education in a Free Society recommended in 1945 that Harvard prescribe specific courses in western thought, literature and science for all students, the Faculty opted instead for a selection of courses in Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and the Humanities. Many other institutions imitated this system, although few devised specific general education courses, preferring instead to let students fulfill the distribution requirement with departmental offerings...
Educators at U.S. institutions that have just changed or are now changing their general education programs, say that over the years the purpose of general education requirements has been lost through options and exemptions for students and lack of guidelines about liberal education for faculties. Rudolph Weingartner, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, says Northwestern's old four-area distribution requirement assured only that students would take whatever courses in the various departments fit their schedules, without any concern for fashioning a coherent education...
...coming up with solid and coherent general education programs, the two schools reasserted the importance of undergraduate liberal arts...