As registration time gets closer, students are faced with difficult decisions. There are thousands of classes from which to choose, ranging from Viscous Fluid Flow to Rhetoric and Popular Music. It is up to students to pick those that will get them where they want to go. But as a group of 18- to 22-year-olds, do we really know where we want to go? Are we the best guides for our education, or do we need a little more guidance?
The idea of a core curriculum has recently gone out of fashion in education. In an extremely competitive economy, students are more preoccupied with learning specific, marketable skills than reading classical literature or studying history. Students who do select liberal arts or fine arts majors are often belittled for choosing invalid majors. But the truth is, a real education includes at least a taste of the arts. It includes a broad range of core courses that improve not only your knowledge but also yourself.
A student can graduate from the UT with minimal writing and reading abilities if competent at calculus. One can graduate with no understanding of governments, wars and leaders who have brought the world to where it is if successful in accounting. One does not need to encounter philosophy as long as one can stand in front of a class and give a PowerPoint presentation.
I do not mean to belittle such useful fields of research as engineering, business and communication. But the purpose of attending an institution of higher education should not be to develop one's self into a high-demand product. It should be to expand one's capability to think.
Taking classes in only one discipline, especially one that is formulaic and mechanical, does not allow a student to understand what options are available or to learn more about him or herself. The value of a liberal arts education is in thinking outside the book. Most of the time a liberal arts textbook cannot tell you the right answer. Rather, it gives you the facts or the ideas of others and asks you to evaluate them and to add to them.
Most 18-year-olds do not know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. They have little to no exposure to many of the fields of study available to them. By requiring freshmen to declare majors on their applications, having a very limited core curriculum and making it difficult for students to transfer among colleges, UT locks students into career paths that may not be right for them, instead of opening their minds to a wider world.
The University is attempting to address these problems with the recent creation of the Undergraduate Studies department and dean. The effort should be applauded and continued. UT must not devolve into a collection of technical schools preparing students to be capable calculators but should prepare them to be freethinking, well-rounded individuals. To do this, they will need a core curriculum that gives more guidance to students' educations.
Sheridan is a Plan II and political communications sophomore.
