Word: programed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pressure to institute departmental courses in the lower level program has increased in the last few years, in part because many departments felt that they had to offer potential concentrators a way of using the General Education program, as the History department does. Proposals to make elementary Government and Economics courses into part of the Gen Ed requirement have been rejected, but the sentiment is still strong...
...addition to departmental pressures, the entire College is changing its attitude toward the fundamental ideas of Gen Ed. The most recent manifestation is the Freshman Seminar program. Called by one member of the General Education Committee "advanced work for specialists," the seminars are directed toward far more specialized work than is normally done during the Freshman year, and are in direct opposition to the General Education program. "I feel that the fate of the General Education program depends a great deal on the fate of these other experiments," says Howe; "you can't have both...
...place of the long-standing assumption that a student who has just arrived from school is not prepared to choose his field of concentration, the Seminar program seems to support the hypothesis that a student is fully capable of doing upper level work and entering a field, not merely during the Freshman year, but before it begins. (The members of Seminar groups were generally selected during the summer.) Many Seminar members are taking three courses in one field, and the science seminars are so specialized that the Committee classifies them as "not normally open to Freshmen...
...seminar program also suggests how much the influence of the General Education Committee has diminished during the last decade. Ten years ago the Committee would surely have been extensively consulted during the planning of such a program; this year it was presented with the accomplished fact, and told, in effect, that if it did not permit Gen Ed credit the entire Freshman year experiment would probably collapse...
Accompanying the growing emphasis on specialization is a personnel problem which the Natural Science program has felt for some years. But even now, as it seems possible that distinguished scientists will take greater interest in teaching Gen Ed courses, the difficulties are becoming more acute in other fields...