NATIONAL NEWS — Every day spent on UCSD’s congested campus
makes it more and more difficult to imagine a university that could be any
different. For Tritons, prefab lecture halls, porticoes at Center Hall, the
anxiety of being on a class waitlist and those mysterious hourly chimes have
all come to be unquestioned traits of an institution of learning.
Another accepted characteristic is the proportion of
students with only one goal in mind: passionlessly taking the necessary
classes, obtaining a degree and hightailing it out of here. As they breeze
through general education requirements and enroll in courses specific to their
major, they dismiss what may appear to be irrelevant classes. In so doing,
these students unwittingly prevent themselves from ever attaining any semblance
of cultural depth, a highly important but grossly ignored component of
education.
Granted, it is not an easy task to create a curriculum that
promotes both professional preparedness
and cultural enlightenment — but it is necessary. With solely a vocational
education one may be successful in the workplace, but, let’s face it, people
judge others by what they say and know. Contrary to popular belief, cultural
fluency is not a mere vehicle of pretension but is the key to being a
respectable adult.
In contrast to our degree-producing factory, some schools
have preferred to focus on the
development of wordly students. Many, however, have taken it to the extreme.
For example, the curious, somewhat insular, Buddhist-inspired
Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. is a 451-student school that advocates
“contemplative education,” the idea that higher learning should be coupled with
meditation in order to promote awareness, mindfulness and compassion for
others. One day a semester, classes are canceled to encourage students and
faculty to assemble and participate in an on-campus, in-group meditation. In
that same vein, popular majors include Sacred Ecology, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism,
Poetry, Traditional Eastern Arts and Sanskrit.
Given the curriculum’s glaring one-sidedness, it is a safe
conjecture that Naropa graduates are not looking to corporate America for jobs,
nor are they exposed to an education that will make them competitive, at least
on paper. It is unlikely that employers in fields other than academia or
faddish gurudom would seriously consider
these degrees.
Schools like Naropa should realize that an education with a
limited scope does not bode well for the professional elasticity or future of
their students. Indeed, the areas in which alumni have managed to find work are
severely limited: alternative therapy, poetry (Allen Ginsberg was once a
professor), yoga instruction and religious healing. Hopefully they didn’t take
out too many student loans.
In any case, for those seeking a more comprehensive
curriculum and preferring to not dedicate their education to the Four Noble
Truths, nil desperandum: St. John’s College is accepting applications. However,
the coursework at this centuries-old school is too broad. Students undergo a
program built entirely around an arbitrary list of great books — that is,
famous scholarly compositions in all fields of knowledge that have shaped our
world. To absorb these timeless texts, students do not attend lectures, nor do
they read mere summaries or analyses of these works. They read firsthand the
unabridged, unadulterated words of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Descartes, Euclid,
Rousseau and other canonical scholars of Western thought. And with compulsory
ancient Greek and French language training, Johnnies regularly read and discuss
texts in their original, untranslated form. To add to the mystique, there are
no exams, no classes over 10 people and no grades.
Alas, with too expansive a curriculum comes absolutely no
specialization. By graduation, students will have completed four years of
humanities, language and mathematics as well as a year of music and three years
of science. Comprehensive as it may be, it is professional suicide to educate
yourself without any sort of concentration.
Until employers begin seeking workers capable of discussing
some obscure allegory in Dante’s “Inferno,” an erudite mind with little
understanding of the nuts and bolts of modern society has no place in current
professional spheres. Consequently, a great number of St. John’s graduates go
on to receive PhDs and teach.
This is not to discredit the value of a classical education
(or the credibility of professorship, for that matter), as these curricula
cultivate analytical thinking and a thorough knowledge of the history of
Western consciousness.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether a St. John’s graduate
(or an alumnus of any other great-books school, like Shimer College in Chicago)
could speak knowledgeably about the latest theories in economics and political
science, or tackle a complex math or science problem simply after having read a
series of antiquated books from centuries ago.
It is time for an institution to incorporate elements from
both schools: A place where equal emphasis is placed on rigorous classical
study and world religious practices, which, in turn, can be combined with a
marketable safety net of practical, specialized knowledge (i.e., one’s major).
In other words, an environment that molds knowledgeable, worldly and
professionally prepared citizens of the future.
It may seem impracticable, but some universities have come
pretty close. Columbia University, the University of Chicago and even UCSD all
have variants of this ideal. But there is not enough.
While it is true that programs like Humanities in Revelle College and
Making of the Modern World in Eleanor Roosevelt College can be dull for most,
it is rare to find graduates who think these programs are worthless. Because of
these classes, UCSD students are not only endowed with promising career
prospects, but also the confidence to roam with society’s educated strata. This
is the apotheosis of a modern education, the healthy mixture of scholarship and
solid vocational preparation.
With the help of programs that highlight a balance between
learnedness and marketability, life will naturally become an unremitting quest
for culture, knowledge and professional gratification. Students will begin to
dissociate themselves from the so-called generation of intellectual
indifference. But most importantly, pre-med students will finally have the
knowledge to explain cubism’s significance in the beautiful Picasso original
that will surely grace the walls of thier
Hills
