Scott Withycombe
Perspectives Assistant
Every year the value of a liberal-arts education is pounded into the heads of the Pepperdine students. There is undeniably great value in such an education — it builds well-rounded students with great breadth of knowledge and academic experience. It allows students to explore educational opportunities and interests that might not otherwise be pursued and, in the case of undecided students, helps them to choose a major. A liberal-arts education helps prepare students to live and work in diverse environments. Most importantly, it enables students to explore truth in multiple and varied aspects of life.
The cornerstone of a liberal-arts education is some form of general-education requirements, which force students to pursue studies outside their chosen focus area. At Pepperdine, these 65 to 66 units include a foreign language, humanities, non-western heritage, social science courses and a hard science, among others. The problem is, at Pepperdine general-education requirements run amok.
This is not something that just recently occurred to me. I am a senior and fulfilled all but one of my GE requirements. I actually enjoyed many of the classes I was required to take, but I probably disliked or hated an equal number as well. Some of the classes I disliked were boring, others were unusually demanding for lower-division classes and some were a total waste of money for what students were getting out of them.
It was, for example, during a humanities class that a couple students and I figured out how much money we were wasting per hour of class. More devastating than the cost of the class is the fact that students have to complete three humanities classes during which they either sleep or revisit facts they studied in high school or grade school. By the way, at $890 a unit, students are paying more than $8,000 to enjoy an overkill of western heritage.
It was recently brought to my attention that a humanities teacher this semester actually assigned nine books, costing students over $200. This is a ludicrous amount of work for a three-unit, lower-division course that students are required to balance with “real” classes. It is also an astronomical and unfair expense for the student. This predicament is not unique to humanities.
The problem with the general-education requirements, however, is not necessarily that the classes themselves are bad or that the professors seem to miss the fact that their not-so-captive student audience is there by force. The problem is that the structure is too rigid — there is not enough choice in the program.
Students should be encouraged to take a wide variety of classes. The framework for the program, however, should permit personalized diversification. For example, if students are required to take a course in history, they should be able to select from a general level of courses, picking a class that fits their preferences and interests within a subject.
To some extent, Pepperdine does allow this. When choosing “American Experience” courses, students can somewhat match their interests with the available classes, or when fulfilling the literature requirement, students can pick classes on multiple topics. This should be true of all the required subject areas.
In picking classes that interest them, students would more likely be content in studying the required subject matter. Content students are more involved, and more involved students undoubtedly get more out of classes than do their disgruntled counterparts.
GE programs should not only require that a variety of subjects be studied, but they should also encourage that the study is not wasted. While I was able to regurgitate a significant amount of information on humanities tests and always did well on Spanish tests, I promptly forgot the information after the final. Now, ancient history seems just as distant as it did before I took three courses in humanities, and I am nowhere near proficient in Spanish. If I had a choice in my general-education program, and actually enjoyed and engaged in the classes I selected, perhaps the experience would have been much more valuable and the knowledge much more familiar.
2-3-2005