Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
168 Teaching Minds
Whenever you see a required course in a departmental major,
there is politics behind it. Someone has traded with someone else. If
you make them take my course, then I will vote to make them take
your course. It is how requirements are created at every school. No one
is thinking of the students’ needs, trust me.
So what if we did think of the students’ needs? What would we do
in the third and fourth years of college? It seems obvious that students
would like to learn some job skills and that they would like to be able
to pick subjects that interested them for further study. In addition,
they might have found something that they were working on in the
first 2 years that made them want to get better at it. This is what the
rest of college should look like then.
For computer science, for example, students should get to select
software engineering, as suggested by my colleague earlier, if they
want to be employable, and they should be able to improve cogni-
tive skills that they may have acquired in the first 2 years. They may
not have studied various subspecialties in computer science, so they
should get to choose the ones that interest them. They also may have
an interest in pursuing some noncomputer-related subjects taught at
the university, for their own edification. In other words, they get to
choose and the choices should include job skills and continued use of
the cognitive processes they have honed in the first 2 years. Faculty
simply should offer choices, and students should pick.
What would happen if this were done?
In a world where students got to decide what they studied, many
of the departments listed above would disappear. There might be some
call for Near Eastern languages or art history, but not that much. These
departments exist for historical reasons and universities are reluctant
to get rid of them, so universities make requirements that students
take courses in them. An enormous English department is justified
only by the sense that universities ought to have that sort of thing and
by continuing English literature requirements for students. Without
that, such departments would be much smaller than they are.
Therefore, it is clear that this cannot happen.
What could happen is this: High schools could change and col-
leges would have to adapt. This is possible because high school does
not have to be the way it is today. Its current organization around
academic subjects makes no sense. This can be fixed by simply build-
ing different kinds of high school curricula. But how can we change
high school?
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023914