GE courses generally fail to educate
By Josh Macdonald
Feb. 15, 2006 9:00 p.m.
The idea behind General Education requirements is worthy: Give
students a well-rounded education and the opportunity to explore
subjects outside of their majors.
But if the promise of general education is to encourage
interested, ambitious students to explore different fields in order
to enrich their major coursework, then UCLA’s current system
doesn’t live up to its potential.
This is because general education coursework at UCLA fails to
make itself relative to coursework in a student’s major. In
other words, general education at UCLA functions only as an
addendum to the major coursework instead of an integral foundation
to interdisciplinary thought.
The first way to help encourage the possibility for
interdisciplinary discussion is to create general education
curriculum that allows students leaning toward different majors to
intermingle. At UCLA, general education classes do the exact
opposite.
A student leaning toward a major in the sciences, for instance,
would not be advised to take Astronomy 3, “Nature of the
Universe,” or Earth and Space Sciences 15,
“Introduction to Oceanography,” two popular science
general education classes for those heading toward a major in the
humanities.
A science student would not get any extra general education
credit for taking these classes because he already gets science
general education credit for classes in his major, such as the
Physics 1 series or 6 series.
Similarly, an English, history or sociology student would not
want to take a general education cluster focusing on a subject in
the humanities because chances are that his major will fulfill at
least one, probably more, of the same requirements that the cluster
fulfills.
As a result, a student tends to take GEs with students of a
similar major, even when he is taking classes far outside his area
of study.
The foundations of interdisciplinary thought ““ the
academic interaction of students focused on different disciplines
““ never really happens.
Instead of isolating GEs from major requirements, they should be
more embedded.
Every department on campus could have a lower-division GE class
that it shared with every other department.
For example, the English and life sciences departments could
develop a class on evolution, which would spend half of the time
analyzing aspects of Darwin’s writing and the effects his
theory had on literature.
The other half of the class would use his writing to develop
aspects of the theory of evolution and apply them to life sciences
in general.
A class like this would be a potential GE for students studying
English or the life sciences.
The life sciences students would be challenged by the
literature, and the English students would be challenged by the
concepts of evolutionary science.
The content of the class would encourage students to understand
how their majors interact with other important areas of study.
Similarly, ambitious students would be able to fulfill
requirements of multiple majors by taking one class. As a result,
general education will help facilitate the coursework of students
who want to double and triple major.
Current UCLA General Education requirements keep students from
completing multiple majors without going over the unit
requirements.
If UCLA students can’t take on multiple degrees, chances
are they’ll be less competitive in the scholarship and job
market because employers and organizations that give away
scholarships expect recent graduates to show that they can excel at
many different skills.
A look at the Marshall Scholarship, a prestigious award that
gives graduate students a free ride to a British University of
their choice, shows that having multiple majors is an important
selling point in today’s academic market.
The majority of the winners in the last several years have
completed multiple majors and minors.
General education shouldn’t come at the expense of
sophisticated study. If UCLA can’t afford to give students
smaller, more enriching general education classes, then it
shouldn’t force ambitious students to take them.
I can only hope that most students don’t want to slide
through their education with the help of enormous and mostly
anonymous classes. These types of GEs only hold us back.
Found a general education class that you love or hate?
E-mail Macdonald at [email protected]. Send general
comments to
