In response to an article printed in last month’s University Press.
Apparently, it is the opinion of one writer that core class hours should be stricken from the undergraduate curriculum. Of course this is paraphrasing – he feels they are a waste of time, and money, and, being such irrelevant subjects, they drain your will to study and achieve. He sees these classes as unnecessary steeples on his fast track to graduating with a specific degree. These seem to be pretty harsh attacks against what I thought was the foundation to a college education. In his defense, he agrees a college writing course is a good idea. Talk about a compromise.
Ignorance is willful refusal to seek out and accept an intelligent understanding of our surroundings.
Just so we’re all on the same page, he’s proposing a basic understanding of history, science, math, art, and foreign culture are useless to graduating college students. Luckily he approves of college writing. But what are we to write with such a limited understanding of the world around us? Interpreting what has been written would be just as daunting a chore without these basic standards of study. Having just read a particular short story by Hawthorne, it was essential for me to have a certain level of historic knowledge of Puritan people prior to their arrival in America. Knowing whom the Puritans were changed an entertaining story into an important message about the dangers of hypocrisy in religion. Metaphor and symbolism are lost in the mind of an ignorant reader trying to decipher the meaning behind references made to subjects unknown. Without such content, why not fill each page with continuous gibberish and call it a best seller?
Forgive me for not having planned out the rest of my life at such a young age. My roommate, a junior, is one year away from graduating and still is not sure he chose the right path. Another junior I spoke with today is changing her major for the third time; this will add another two or three years to her enrollment since it is a completely different field of study. My point: people change careers, not jobs but careers, several times in their life. Calm down and take what you can from school. Besides, as my dad would say, “A B.A. in political science and thirty-five cents will get you a local call.”
The difference between a University and a Vocational Institution: A university is meant to produce educated and cultured individuals while Vocational Institutions are meant to produce competent employees for a very specific job market.
If you do not like to learn, get out.
