I. Why General Education Matters

What is general education? In the undergraduate curriculum, general education is often contrasted with specialized education in this way: Specialized education is the province of the major, in which students, through a process of self-appraisal of their aptitudes and interests, choose one or more fields of study to explore in depth. General education is the vast and diverse terrain lying outside the major. It is imposed on students quite independently of aptitude with two aims: (1) providing some exposure to the whole range of disciplines and areas of knowledge associated by tradition or by institutional convention as the arts and sciences, and (2) developing a set of general critical competencies (e.g., in writing, quantitative analysis, a foreign language) expected of all liberally educated men and women.

A liberal arts education, then, is the composite of these two elements: general education to promote educational breadth and a major (or majors) to ensure knowledge in depth. The component parts of the major are best determined by colleagues in a given field, who by their specialized competencies can be expected to agree about what it should comprehend and how it should be developed through a student’s course of study. In the contemporary university, the paucity of opportunities for sustained discourse about education and pedagogy among colleagues in different fields militates against a similar consensus about what general education should include and about how it should be organized and developed in a student’s program. Institutions have adopted various responses to the consequent divergence of opinion, which fall into several broad categories.

One response is the relatively simple mechanism of a distributional system, which depends on only a minimal consensus concerning the division of disciplines—typically, into the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities—and requires each student to be exposed to some number of courses in each division outside the one in which his or her major lies. Within the distributional system, faculty can teach whatever they want to teach provided that they contribute their share to meeting the needs of their department’s major programs and provided that their department as a whole teaches its share of the school’s total undergraduate credit units. This was the system in effect in the College at Penn prior to the curricular reform of 1987.

A second response, which we may call free choice, makes a virtue of radical individualism and expects each student to decide what courses beyond the major will best serve his or her educational needs and interests. Like the distributional system, this one seems to leave faculty free to teach whatever they want. The effect of student choice, however, is to impose rather strong market constraints on faculty teaching. If a large number of the students find that they have no use for or interest in a certain field of knowledge, there will be no educational reason for an institution to build faculty strength in that area. Equally seriously, students may graduate with wide gaps in their knowledge and with little competence in one or more critical intellectual skills. The essential elements of this system have been in effect at Brown University dating back to 1850, and that system was reaffirmed in 1969 with an increased participation by students in new course development and curricular planning.

A third response, older than the other two and indeed rooted to some degree in the curriculum of the medieval university, proposes to distill general education into a set of required core courses dealing with canonical texts. Today, the core system depends on the conservation of an original consensus among faculty about foundational ideas and texts with which all educated persons should be conversant. Columbia University provides perhaps the best evidence that such a consensus, if allowed to adapt either through cautious amendment of the canon or by making room for contemporary critical perspectives, can remain vital.

Most general educational curricula either fall within one of these three types or seek to blend elements of two or all three of them. At Penn, both the 1987 reform known as the General Requirement and the experimental Pilot Curriculum begun in 2000 represent an attempt to strike a balance between a strict distributional and a core system.

Like a core system, these mixed models embody a more substantive commitment to defining areas of knowledge which faculty agree to be the foundations on which a broad undergraduate education is to be organized. The tripartite divisions used in a typical distributional system reflect convenient organizational units into which faculty divide themselves with respect to the disciplines in which they have become specialized. By contrast, the sectors of Penn’s present General Requirement reflect an attempt to divide knowledge or modes of inquiry into broad categories for the purpose of guiding students in the construction of a broad general education.

Again, like the core system, the Penn models designate certain courses that are appropriate vehicles for the goals of general education, however these might be defined. The assumption is that some courses are more conducive to promoting these goals than others.

Unlike the core system and similar to both the distributional and free choice systems, Penn’s 1987 curriculum designates a wide array of courses (which at the present moment has grown to some 289 courses) as suitable for satisfying requirements in various areas of knowledge. The Pilot Curriculum may in this respect seem more like a traditional core curriculum than our current curriculum, but that is really just a consequence of the small scale on which the Pilot is being conducted. There are fewer courses and thus there is less choice, but the courses in a given category of the Pilot Curriculum differ significantly among themselves in content and even in approach, although the differences are not as great as among the more numerous courses that fall within the parallel sector of our current general requirement curriculum.

So far, the challenge of general education has been conceived as the problem of how to organize and present that portion of the curriculum that lies outside the major. The contemporary university, in placing so high a value on the specialized expertise of its faculty, has little trouble defining what should go on in the major, but it is often at a loss to define what goes on outside the major. If, however, the point of departure for thinking about the curriculum is the intellectual needs of undergraduate students rather than the departmental structures into which the work of the faculty is organized, then a different picture of the relation between general and specialized education comes into view. From the perspective of the undergraduate students, who often need to discover their interests and find where they want to concentrate their studies, the whole of education is general education. The challenge of general education as the student confronts it is to achieve an integrated understanding of the various connections among all domains of learning: in the major, in designated general education courses, in electives, in disciplines across all of the divisions of the arts and sciences. The student perspective is that the requirements, both specialized and general, should cultivate habits of mind that will enable a Penn College graduate to sustain a life of intellectual curiosity and learning.

II. A Renewed Statement of Purpose for General Education at Penn

The general education component of an undergraduate’s educational program supports structured inquiry into the curriculum, particularly at the beginning of a student’s undergraduate career. It is usually divided into sets of required courses and courses that develop specific intellectual skills, such as the ability to interpret data quantitatively or to converse in a foreign language. General education courses should support breadth in a student’s education and should make an explicit attempt to expose students to modes of inquiry and the ways of interpreting and creating knowledge that are embodied in different disciplines. General education courses should be broad, not necessarily as introductions to bodies of knowledge or in the amount of material they cover, but primarily in the questions they open up for students, in the understanding of inquiry in one or more disciplines that they foster, and in the suggestion of areas for additional study that students may pursue. General education courses should inspire students to pursue intellectually rigorous undergraduate careers and to avoid paths of least resistance. Ideally, general education should also stimulate a sense of community and intellectual discourse among students by presenting them with issues both classic and modern and in which they can engage with one another both in and out of the classroom. Students can then build upon their general education courses both in terms of finding a specific area of study (the major) and in pursuing other interests with their electives.

An important goal of the General Education Requirement is to foster a sense of intellectual community among first year undergraduates. As students come to us from diverse backgrounds and educational experiences, we believe that a well-defined, cohesive collection of courses will facilitate this important aim. We do not believe that a community of scholars has to engage necessarily a core set of “texts” to achieve this end. Rather, exposure to a prescribed array of “modes of inquiry” designed to inspire on-going conversations among the student body will create an educational experience that they will remember as meaningful and influential activities in their intellectual lives.

Our current general requirement succeeds quite admirably in meeting some of our goals. Many students take advantage of the general requirement to try out different disciplines, to explore possibilities for majors, and to find areas of interest of which they were previously unaware. New courses are proposed every year, suggesting the continuing engagement of our faculty in developing courses for general education purposes. Student surveys also show that students are reasonably satisfied with the opportunity to broaden their intellectual horizons that is provided by the general requirement. However, there are also growing concerns about the shape of the general requirement and the means students use to satisfy it.

-over time the number of courses that may be used to satisfy the general requirement has grown tremendously and they include some fairly specialized courses as well as some introductions to disciplines that are taught without reflection about their general education purposes.

-the exponential growth of advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs has allowed students to place out of their general education requirements with courses taken early in their high school careers. This has the tendency to blur distinctions between high school and the first year of college instead of promoting the first year as a time for new, rigorous intellectual challenges. Increasingly departments have come to agree that advanced placement/IB courses are not truly equivalent to courses taken at the University of Pennsylvania.

-since many of the general education courses appear so similar to those taken in high school, there are students who approach general education with the attitude that it is something “to be gotten out of the way” and they will follow the paths of least resistance through the general requirement.

-the content of many of our science general education courses has not always been well-suited to the needs of those of our students who do not intend to major in the sciences. The level of dissatisfaction about our general education science courses among both students and faculty is readily apparent.

While unease about general education may not be large enough to proclaim that our general education requirement as it currently exists is broken, there is a consensus among the committee members that it is time to pay general education some serious and critical attention.

After reviewing the General Requirement’s characteristics and determining an initial set of goals for the requirement, the Committee on Undergraduate Education looked at various possible structural changes to our requirements that might foster our goals. The committee recommends that the faculty of SAS engage in serious discussions of these alternatives as we seek to evaluate the existing curriculum, to learn some of the lessons of our experiences of the pilot experiment, and to move forward with discussions about future requirements.

In general, it was felt that the concept behind the current seven sector and ten course structure was a sound one, representing an effective compromise between a very narrow requirement consisting of only a few core courses and a mere distributional requirement drawing from an unrestricted pool of courses. However, the committee also felt that some changes to the current structure would be desirable. Some of the goals of the structural changes would be

• to encourage the development of new courses
• to provide a mechanism and funding for experimental courses
• to encourage students to move well beyond their high school experience
• to provide for a constant refreshing of the curriculum
• to encourage students to broaden their educational experience beyond their major(s)

With these goals in mind, the committee discussed the use of AP course credits as replacements for units of the general requirement. During the past few years, the requirements of many departments for AP credit have gradually increased from a score of 4 to 5 reflecting some misgivings about the suitability of AP courses as substitutes for the corresponding college courses for any but the most capable of our students. Some AP exams, (e.g., economics) are also no longer considered as equivalent to the entry level course in that subject area. The committee felt strongly that AP credits were NOT a substitute for the general requirement, that the intellectual expectations for general education at a university like Penn should be higher than what could be satisfied by high school equivalency in math, science, and social studies courses.

Similarly, the general requirement should not be satisfied merely by introductory courses taken by a student to complete their major requirements. Thus, with suitable adjustments to the number of courses required, the committee felt that introductory courses for majors should not be used to satisfy the general requirement by those students majoring in that subject. CUE believes that it is essential for most departments to develop courses targeted toward the non-major student which provide a broader perspective on the subject area and not merely an introductory course or entry level course in the discipline designed primarily for majors in that area.

As a result of some of the structural changes suggested, it may be necessary to reduce the overall ten-course requirement. Ten courses would be excessively constraining for many students if students could not place out of some of the requirements based on AP courses taken in high school or if the courses could not be counted also in the major.

As the current general requirement has aged, it has also grown in size, with 289 courses currently certified as satisfying one of the sector requirements. In spite of this growth in the number of approved courses, however, student enrollment is strongly clustered in a small number of courses within each sector. Many members of CUE raised doubts about whether those high enrollment general requirement courses served the purposes of general education most appropriately. Therefore, reducing the number of courses that satisfy the general requirement will do little to improve general education if the most frequently taken courses are not changed. In addition, the continuously accumulating number of courses has tended to make the general requirement drift in the direction of a distributional system and thus lose its focus. Thus, the committee felt the need to have a sunset provision for general requirement courses whereby approval would expire and the courses would be subject to review in light of well-articulated goals for general education before they could be reinstated.

The Pilot Curriculum has provided a seedbed for experimentation in the curriculum and has assisted in the development of courses that will certainly be a part of the general requirement in the future. The committee felt that this curricular development function was so useful that it should be encouraged and nurtured in the future. Thus, whatever structural changes are eventually adopted by the Faculty, the committee recommends that we also include broad courses of the type that the pilot curriculum has fostered and that we have mechanisms and realistic resources to promote their continuing development.

V. Mechanisms for Course Improvement

New General Education Courses

When new courses are proposed for the general education curriculum it may be useful to offer them first on an experimental basis. The existing Pilot Curriculum might be refashioned into a ‘laboratory’ for testing out courses for the general education requirement. Conceived as a laboratory for testing an entire curricular structure, the Pilot Curriculum has also led to the generation of thirty new general education courses in a mere three years. It has also provided faculty developing and teaching new courses with plenty of occasions to receive constructive criticism of their courses and their pedagogy from colleagues committed to working together to improve general education.

For example, one practice of the Pilot Curriculum that should be preserved is the way in which new courses are presented for approval. The committee entrusted with oversight of general education cannot fulfill its mission simply by passing summary judgments on course proposals that they receive in writing. Instead, faculty proposing new general education courses should discuss their plans with the committee overseeing the general education curriculum early in the process. Once a proposal is prepared, its review should take the form of a conversation among the proposer(s) and the committee members in which all parties consider together the goals of general education and the ways in which the proposed course addresses those goals. What is important in this transaction is not the application of criteria to a proposed course but rather a meeting of minds through which faculty work together to define general education both as an abstract concept and as the particular set of ideas and practices involved in the teaching of the proposed course.

Re-evaluation of Existing Courses

Courses already listed in the general education curriculum also require periodic re-evaluation for several reasons. There is a natural turnover of courses (both of titles and content) as particular instructors leave the University and new faculty arrive. Departments periodically re-assess teaching priorities as well, sometimes shifting their emphases to other offerings. As a result, some courses continue to be listed in the general education roster even though they are no longer offered on a regular basis. Others are taught regularly but may change substantially in syllabus, orientation and goals from year to year.

General education courses should come up for re-evaluation at least once every 5 years. In any given year some courses will normally be taken off the general education roster and others added. The evaluation process should be staggered; all existing courses need not be evaluated in a given year. The committee should consider issues like:

a) Does the courses meet our goals for a general education? [see below]
b) Is the course offered on a regular basis?
c) Is the instructor a member of the standing faculty?

The Goals of a General Education Course

Departments know very well how to mount courses leading to majors. But agreement either within or among departments as to what constitutes a general education course is more difficult to achieve.

As already noted, in the absence of such guidelines, courses that are introductions to majors all too often double as general education courses. The difficulty with this state of affairs is that such courses are often (though not always) designed as ‘prequels’; they are meant to lay the groundwork for further, more specialized study in a discipline; they function as prerequisites to other courses. Yet for the typical student most courses taken to fulfill the general education requirement are not followed by more specialized study in the discipline; this is so almost by definition. It may be that many of our current general education courses provide a groundwork on which nothing gets built – at least, for the majority of students who take them.

The primary goal of a general education course is to provide an intellectual experience that is both substantial and self-standing. The course should be ‘substantial’ in the usual sense (rigorous, demanding, etc.). In addition, the course is best designed as a ‘self-standing’ exposure to a topic, or area, or field of knowledge, not as a prequel to more specialized coursework in a discipline. Successful general education courses may well draw students into a major; but this should be viewed as incidental to the goals of the course.