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Stardate 20011124.0750 (On Screen via life form detectors): One of those wonderful mush-words that people with an agenda like to use is "illiteracy. Usually it's used with regard to our education system by someone lamenting that students aren't getting enough exposure to some specific subject, e.g. economic illiteracy (by people thinking that a basic course in economics should be a requirement) or mathematical illiteracy (also dubbed "innumeracy"). This article discusses the fact that college students have only a very vague understanding of Western Civilization and wants that to become a standard course.

The only problem with this concept is that a college student's time is a finite quantity. The more time he is forced to spend getting a broad education, the less time he'll have to specialize and pick a detailed knowledge of one subject around which he'll presumably make his career. There was a time when a college education did not involve specialization; every student took a broad range of subjects but ended up with no specialized concentration. This was most common in the UK and it was normal for the offspring of the aristocracy, who because of inherited power and wealth didn't actually need to specialize or make a career.

Gradually a different point of view appeared: that a college education was an investment intended to qualify someone for a career, and that meant it needed to concentrate, which meant that necessarily a broad education would suffer as it was displaced. That's the norm now at most American universities.

Between 1972 and 1976 I attended Oregon State University. At the time, the university only had two course requirements: the infamous Writing 121 and a requirement to take three terms of Physical Education. Writing 121 was ostensibly supposed to teach us how to express ourselves on paper. (It didn't work for me; I learned to write on my own much later.) But the course instructor took that opportunity to expose the heathen to as much culture as he could, so in addition to practicing writing, it turned out to be a concentrated course in Lit. (That failed, too; I haven't got the slightest interest in reading Lit.) My college, the School of Science, had much stronger requirements: a one-year sequence in a physical science (chemistry or physics), a one year sequence in a biological science (biology or zoology), and a stiff requirement to take humanities courses without specifying which ones to take. I think that was all to the good, and I'm glad I did those things. The Zoology and Physics courses that I took turned out to be immensely useful to me in my life as an engineer, since Zoology gave me the theoretical background for ergonomics, and Physics let me understand what the EE's were doing.

It's interesting that the School of Humanities did not in turn have a requirement to take any science, so far as I know. I later came to the conclusion that this was because they knew that if Humanities students had to pass a Science course to graduate, they would generate very few Humanities graduates. The School of Science, on the other hand, had no trouble graduating people even with a requirement for something like 50 hours of humanities -- which should tell you something about the quality of the students in each department. (It was an open secret that most humanities students were the ones who couldn't hack the hard subjects.)

In turn, the Department of Computer Science had additional requirements. In addition to (quite naturally) requiring a large number of CS courses, we were all required to take Calculus. Which was fun; I had a good teacher. But I don't use it and I've forgotten nearly all of it. On the other hand, Mathematics teaches you something deeper because it is exact, rigorous, and doesn't admit half measures. You either get the right answer or you don't; mathematics doesn't pay off on good tries. (If we really want to slay multiculturalism and fuzzy thinking from the universities, we should require every student to take and pass a basic course in Mathematics. Heh, of course that means you'd never see another graduate in American Lit again...)

But to listen to some academics, every student should take mathematics, physics, biology, economics, history, lit, a foreign language, psychology, philosophy, logic... and once you're through with all that, you've completely filled a four year curriculum and there's no time remaining to actually specialize in anything.

Moira is right: this isn't the University's job; it should have been taken care of in high school. College isn't about making someone a better citizen and a better person; it's an expensive and utilitarian investment in a better future for the student. (discussion in progress)