Professors teach their pet subjects well. I took spiritual writing with John Struloeff, who happens to be writing a book on Leo Tolstoy. He went on a tangent about him halfway through class one day, and 30 minutes later, we were all so wrapped up in Tolstoy’s life that we had forgotten to take our break. That’s learning, and that’s why we’re here.
At other schools if your professor is working to get published, he or she is not also teaching you. The teaching assistant is. Not so at Pepperdine, and that’s one of the things that makes us such a great school. The more professors love what they’re teaching, the more students will love learning it.
Love of learning cannot be manufactured, however. The concept behind general education makes sense. Everyone should have a basic understanding of certain events and concepts before graduating, but requiring so many courses encourages box-checking instead of intellectual investigation.
Choosing a major is specializing, and writing a thesis is even more so, but students’ intellectual curiosity shouldn’t have to lie dormant through two years of GEs to get there.
Everyone’s required to complete a non-Western history course, but everyone gets to choose how they fulfill that requirement. How great is that! If the same principle were extended to other GEs, and not just Religion 301, students would necessarily be more interested in their studies. They’d be studying subjects of their choosing.
This principle is evident on a small scale. Usually, what a student remembers most from a class is what he had to personally research and write about. My roommate is a Theater major who has a weird hang-up about color. When he was assigned a research paper, he checked out some books from Payson on the psychology of color and went to work analyzing costume designs of certain characters. If that sounds nerdy of him and boring to you, good. He researched that. You don’t have to. But I bet if he had the opportunity to explain it to you, you’d be a whole lot more interested in it.
So it is with courses. The most talked about offerings in the catalog are the most specific. Yes, there is a class here on Harry Potter and one on the politics of Middle-earth. I took a course called “Baseball as American History.” As I learned more about baseball, I learned more about America. For example, by studying something specific, the growth of Little League baseball in the 1950s, I finally had evidence to support a broader trend, the suburbanization of America, that I had until then only been told about.
If you’re still not convinced specificity is ultimately helpful or relevant, consider a fictional example — Sherlock Holmes. Now, my understanding of this character rests entirely on Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of him but, from what I’ve gathered, Holmes is a master of induction. Yes, induction. The movies may commend his “deductions,” but Holmes is, in fact, focusing on the minutest of details and understanding the larger picture of events. For example, he’s able to discern Watson’s fiancee had been married before by a tan line on her ring finger. That’s a relevant detail.
The point of all this specificity is not to become a Technical Tony, correcting people willy-nilly on every little detail. The point is to actually care enough about one thing to learn it well. It’s easy to make big claims or learn lots of empty facts, but depth always has more lasting power than breadth. That’s why bunkers are better than trenches and why I’m about to work on my thesis to the exclusion of my other homework.
