General Education

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You spend a good part of your college career going through the general education or “GE” pattern, but what do you get out of it? General education’s purpose is to expose students to a wide variety of teachings rather than that of just your major. The GE curriculum was first established in 1919 at Columbia University, and it begs the question of how relevant the system is and if there is room for change. (Hunt 401) Today students are being faced with new challenges such as tuition and competitive job markets along with the dissatisfaction over the limited choice to pick classes. As a result of these new obstacles, general education has become stagnant and alien to the modern dilemmas facing students, and without a change, the system has no place …show more content…
Robert Zai III highlights the importance of general education in that it “ provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and forms the basis for developing essential intellectual, civic, and practical capacities.”(197) What Robert Zai explains is the basis of the argument for general education in that it promotes this basis for learning a broad array of topics. But in trying to promote such a broad curriculum, there is limited success in it. Robert introduces a counterclaim to its successfulness “Particularly relevant to the current study; evidence suggests that faculty members' emphasis on deep approaches to learning varies considerably by discipline.”(202) The idea of general education is to give the same level of in-depth analysis over the entire program however it isn't possible and is an example on why trying to regulate the college experience does not …show more content…
At Sonoma State, for example, you need 50 GE credits, the credits for your major, and the rest of the credits are electives. A method to improve the system is to lower the total amount of credits needed to graduate to 100 from 120 and changing it so that you are only required to reach that number with no restrictions on what types of class you take. We solve not only the economic issue by allowing people to graduate faster time we also give the students freedom to choose whatever classes they want. This idea is what college is all about, having the choice to take whatever courses that they wish to, giving them the ability to explore all types of fields without worrying about completing requirements. The freedom to pick a majority of classes does not mean that students will lose out on the critical thinking skills or the chance to discover what major is right for them. The idea is instead that it gives them more freedom to pick classes they are interested in, and they are still taking college-level courses so it will not take away from the critical thinking aspect that general education offers. None of these suggestions are without faults, but they show that there are alternatives to the current way that general education is being handled which will result in more student
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