Recently in the Graphic’s Oct. 6 “Ask a Wave,” a freshman answered the question “What should Pepperdine students be protesting?” with “GE courses.” The frustration of this blossoming Renaissance woman presents an interesting problem for the general education program. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that a typical person, intent upon his or her major, should want to focus solely on that. But on the other hand, education is not simply about giving a person the knowledge they want. It seems a happy middle might exist between protesting GEs or majoring in all of them, in understanding how they probably benefit your area of interest.
I’ll take an easy example, business and history. Even a basic understanding of history should give someone a good idea of economic relations. When certain events occur, the demand for particular goods increases. If one can make good historical predictions (i.e., predict the course of events in the near future by comparison to past examples), that person can make a lot of money.
To make this more concrete, I’ll use an example my great uncle Peter told me about his uncle. They were sitting together before the outbreak of World War II. Peter’s uncle asked him “Do you want to know how to make a lot of money?” He picked up the newspaper and told Peter that war was going to break out. Already a wealthy man, he then picked up the telephone and bought the majority of the sand and bag material used for sandbags available in the U.K. at the time. I don’t know how much money he profited off of that, but I think enough has been said. A little historical knowledge can go a long way. It might not always be that easy, or that simple, but if your uncle isn’t a wealthy capitalist, you might benefit from learning a bit of history in class and applying that knowledge to business.
In the words of Immanuel Kant, “No inquisitiveness is more detrimental to the expansion of our cognition than the inquisitiveness that always wants to know the benefit in advance … before we could frame the least concept of that benefit.” Asking the value of a thing before you understand it renders you incapable of understanding its value. I believe this is largely the case with people who wish to protest their GE courses.
To illuminate this value, think of whatever it is you enjoy studying — what you are not coerced to study by Seaver’s academic system. Did you come to discover this yourself, or did you discern this taste through being forced to take courses in that field? Or even if you were not forced to take courses in the field of your preference, you were probably exposed to that field within the academic context by a professor, parent or someone in the role of teaching. This example does not hold for every major. For instance, if you study business, that probably had little to do with being forced to take a business course. But for any academic field, I believe my example holds, and it indicates one of the values of the general education program. It exposes individuals to fields of study, which they may wish to pursue.
