A plea for humanistic education.

IN ONE OF THE LAST THINGS he wrote before he died in 1961, Carl Jung worried about the likelihood that America would succumb to a "collectivist belief." This would occur because of our "materialist and collectivist" character and our lack of a sense of history. In Jung's words, America "is perhaps more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the more influenced by the scientific Weltanschauung with its statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical and humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence." (1)

I want to echo Jung's concerns and suggest that our educational system is steeped in the scientific Weltanschauung, and, further, that it is struck dumb by the seductions of vocationalism and over-specialization. I would like to suggest that we do, in fact, need to return to a broader and more "historical and humanistic" approach to education. The problem is compounded not only by the confusion of purpose within the academy itself--currently focused upon cultural battles that divide teaching faculty into warring camps and render curriculum development haphazard at best--but also by the lack of preparation of our students. I will address each of these issues in turn, beginning with a quick look at the data that suggest that Robert P. George, of Princeton University, was not exaggerating when he said that "our students come to us already profoundly miseducated; we simply complete the job." (2)

According to U.C.L.A.'s Higher Education Research Institute, American college students are "increasingly disengaged from the academic experience." (3) This claim was graphically demonstrated in the case of Peter Sacks, who recently found out that the students in his classroom in a California Community College

  do not read the assigned material. They avoid participating in class
  discussions, they expect high grades for mediocre work, they ask for
  fewer assignments, they resent attendance requirements, they complain
  about course workloads, they do not like "tough" and demanding
  professors, they do not prepare adequately for tests or class, they
  skip opportunities to improve their class performance and grade, they
  are impatient with deliberate analysis, they regard intellectual
  pursuits as "boring," they resist the intrusion of course requirements
  on their time and they are apathetic and defeatist in the face of
  challenge. (4)

Not only are they disengaged, as Sacks attests, but they do not seem to be very well informed about rudimentary facts, either. As Benjamin Stein noted in a Washington Post story, in his work with Los Angeles focus groups made up of high school and college students,

  none could place the date of the Declaration of Independence. I could
  not find one single student in either high school or college who could
  tell me the years when World War II was fought. Nor have I found one
  who could tell me the years when World War I was fought. Nor could I
  find one who knew when the Civil War was fought.... (5)

These anecdotes are confirmed by research done for the National Education Progress Report of 1976 that shows a drop in general knowledge among college students of 11 percent between 1969 and 1976. That drop has continued and was confirmed by a N.A.E.P. study conducted in 1985 which shows that, by 1984, 56 percent fewer students scored above 600 on the SATs than in 1972 and 73 percent fewer scored above 650. The problem became so serious recently that the College Board found it necessary to raise the SAT scores. "This was accomplished by a 'non-linear transformation' of the verbal SAT from 425 to 500." (6)

According to the report Nation At Risk, published in 1983, American students do not compare favorably with students in other industrialized nations of the world, failing to come in first or second on any of 19 academic tests and coming in last seven times. That report also indicated that the average achievement of American high school students on most standardized tests was lower than it had been 26 years previously, and that many 17 year-olds who plan to attend college do not possess the "higher order" intellectual skills necessary to write a persuasive essay or solve a mathematical problem requiring several steps. Furthermore, we are told that the average American college student's vocabulary has shrunk by 72 percent when compared with college students of sixty years ago, almost certainly as a result of a technological revolution that has made reading passe.

Many Freshman students in a required course I taught several years ago were using "Cliff's Notes" to assist them to understand Huxley's Brave New World, and I spoke with a professor of Engineering recently who said that a growing number of his students cannot solve word problems because they do not understand what the problems are asking them to do. As things now stand, 30 percent of entering Freshmen in four-year colleges across the country require remedial work. In some cases the percentage runs as high as 50 percent. (7) These percentages should be considered in light of the fact that a number of our basic Freshman courses now offered as standard fare would have been labeled "remedial" forty or fifty years ago.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the incoming college Freshmen, who demand courses that will challenge them as little as possible, cannot perform basic mathematical computations, comprehend what they read, or write a coherent sentence. To be sure, a great many more high school students are attending college today than they were fifty years ago; nonetheless, we must conclude that either the students today are not as bright as they were in bygone days, or that Robert George is right and the schools are simply not doing their job.

It is not difficult to determine how this has come about. Two main factors have resulted in the dumbing-down of high school and college curricula. There was a major effort in the late 1940s to focus attention in the schools on the "disadvantaged student" in the guise of teaching what was called "real-life experience" with a correlative de-emphasis on fundamental intellectual skills, such as reading and writing. This approach was linked to progressive educational theories that soon spawned the "self-esteem movement" that is prevalent today and that has turned attention away from curriculum to the students themselves. These trends resulted in what E.D. Hirsch has called "cafeteria style education" that takes place in the "shopping mall high school" and caters to juvenile whims. By 1983,50 percent or more of the units required for graduation in thirteen states were elective courses, many of which had nothing whatever to do with education. The effort fostered a plethora of "life-adjustment" courses stressing personal service and development, courses such as "Home and Family," "Life and Leisure," "Tools of Learning," and "Work Experience." According to Nation At Risk, by 1983 one-fourth of the courses offered in our nation's high schools were "life-adjustment" courses, work-study outside of school, or remedial English or mathematics.

The hint that dumbing down the curriculum was the way to go can be found in the remarks made by junior high school Principal A.H. Lauchner in 1951. Echoing a theme that appeared in the document Education for All American Youth in 1944, which claimed "there is no aristocracy of subjects .... Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and homemaking are all peers," Lauchner told his readers that "When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write, or spell ... that many of them either cannot or will not master these chores ... then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high school curriculum...." (8)

Note the lack of mention here of the need every human being has for some level of self-determination; there is no sense that a person's happiness and well-being stem from self-confidence based upon genuine achievement; there is no sense that a student whose mind is undeveloped remains enslaved to someone else; rather, there is merely a concern that we do what the students "like" and that the school is a "nice place in which to live." Students do not achieve a sense of genuine worth from a dumbed-down curriculum and inflated grades. Well-meaning faculty who sincerely care about their students must admit, albeit reluctantly, that this tree has borne only rotten fruit.

The second factor I would point to is the Herculean effort some colleges are making to recruit average students the way coaches recruit athletes. Admissions teams have taken a pro-active approach to recruiting students, complete with marketing firms, colorful and expensive viewbooks and videos, and the latest in technical wizardry. As has been noted in this regard, "before they arrive we ply the students with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotus land. When they get here, flattery and nonstop entertainment are available, if that's what they want." (9) We seem to be dealing with disengaged, disenchanted, and under-prepared students who have been assured that demands will not be made of them and they will be made as comfortable as possible. Behind the smiling face of the undergraduate student who sits nodding in our classes, we find the empty head of an ill-prepared and spoiled child.

What I have done here with all these generalizations based on statistics and anecdotes is precisely what Jung warned against. As Jung reminds his fellow analysts (and by extension, those of us who try to teach the young), "... it is just the unique, individual human being who, when stripped of all those conformities and regularities so dear to the heart of the scientist, is the supreme and only object of investigation.... As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics." (10)

We must remind ourselves that there is no such thing as the "average" student, and that none of our students precisely fits the rather depressing picture of the "typical" college student outlined above. The Sally and the Henry who appear with some regularity in our classrooms are not average students, they are young persons who need to gain possession of their minds in order to survive in an increasingly complex and bewildering world.

Generally speaking, however, we can say with some confidence that we face classrooms full of overindulged, disengaged students who are more interested in job preparation than they are in learning what is of lasting importance. How do we approach this difficult task? I begin by noting that what we do not want to do is to continue to dumb down the curriculum and cater to our students' whims, ignoring the fact that what they need is to stretch their minds and grow intellectually. Maureen Stout was certainly correct when she noted, "Dumbing down curricula in order to make kids feel good about themselves cheats them of the opportunity to develop their full potential and, in the process, develop real self-esteem--the self-confidence that comes only from success." (11)

What I suggest is not impossible, but it is certainly difficult for students and faculty alike, and it incorporates another of Jung's pet themes: balance. I suggest that the undergraduate curricula at most of our colleges and universities are precariously out of balance and I would propose what I shall call the "40/40/40 plan." I recommend a balance among General Education requirements, major requirements, and electives of 40 semester credits each. Let us examine each of these elements in turn, beginning with electives.

Elective courses were introduced by Harvard College at the turn of the last century at a time when young people going to college were fairly well prepared to do serious college work. They were even in a position to make more or less intelligent choices among a limited range of courses that were not strictly speaking required for graduation. When the President of Harvard, Charles Eliot, introduced the notion of elective courses, his rationale was based on his insistence that the students themselves were in a better position to say what they wanted than were the members of the Harvard faculty.

Faculty members are not omniscient, to be sure, but they know more than their students do--we would hope. In addition students are not nearly as well prepared for college now as they were a hundred years ago. The real question is not what the students want but what they need in order to become educated persons, and it is not clear that students in Eliot's day knew what they needed any more than today's students do.

It makes no sense to hand the typical Freshman student of today a course schedule and let him or her roam at will through the incoherent territory of elective courses. Being human, and fitting more or less the profile suggested by Peter Sacks, the student will, with rare exception, take the path of least resistance, with little if any idea which of the many courses available are worthwhile.

Consider the situation carefully: students are, typically, disengaged and ill-prepared for college; territorial faculty encroach almost daily on elective courses as they increase their majors beyond reasonable limits or add certification requirements mandated by external agencies. Elective courses are considered fair game in the relentless effort to build academic majors, and students are lucky if they find they have any electives whatever in their normal four-year program. Students are further victimized by being deluded into thinking that picking through whatever elective courses are left guarantees them some sort of "freedom" in determining curricular choices. Elective courses as they are now found in most American colleges and universities cannot be defended on academic grounds. I hasten to note, however, that this is not sufficient reason to eliminate electives altogether, since there are steps that could be taken that would rescue them from academic no-man's-land and make them respectable. I have several suggestions in this regard.

To begin with, faculty must take a more active role in assisting disengaged and ill-prepared students through the sometimes bewildering territory of elective courses. We in teaching have hidden the fact that we have abandoned any attempt to provide our students with a coherent educational experience behind the vapid excuse that we only seek to "tailor instruction to the needs of the individual student." If we adopt the proposal under review, we can, in fact, work toward that very goal. If faculty members adopt a serious, mentoring role, and administrations give them the support they need, elective courses can be made intelligible and fit nicely into a coherent educational scheme that is also adapted to the needs of a student. Therefore, we must not eliminate elective courses, we must fight to enlarge that territory, under specific conditions.

At a minimum, one-third of the student's undergraduate curriculum should be guaranteed to that student in the form of elective courses that are not to be sacrificed to major, ancillary, or certification requirements. These courses should be "selected electives," comprising courses of relatively equal merit chosen by members of the faculty who do not have a vested interest in the courses so chosen. These "selected electives" should be chosen on the grounds of whether or not they enhance the goal of humanizing students and not whether or not they conform to a pre-conceived vocational paradigm or direct students towards specific majors.

Such elective courses would assure that students will achieve a degree of breadth in their curriculum and not become narrow specialists; carefully selected by the student with the help of an academic mentor, they can help that student achieve a degree of positive, human freedom--especially if their mentor is not their major advisor. This is an important codicil: major advisors tend to want to direct students toward the advisor's own areas of academic interest, not necessarily those areas that will most benefit the students themselves.

There are a number of benefits that would accrue from this plan. To begin with, it would allow faculty members to think seriously about, and play a vital role in, assisting students to take courses that would fit in with their educational goals and complement (and not merely augment) their major requirements. As Christopher Lasch once noted, one of the unfortunate effects of the elective system was that "it relieved the faculty from the need to think about the broader purpose of education ... and about the relation of one branch of knowledge to another." (12) This proposal would address that issue. Secondly, it would make academic sense of the elective system, which at present is indefensible. Finally, it would lay the groundwork for a truce in the culture wars. To see this we must briefly consider the core requirement.

The core requirement should be made coherent and rationally defensible. It should not merely be another cluster of elective courses, large or small, that are subject to the same criticisms that were raised above, nor should it be merely random, unrelated courses designed to lure unsuspecting undergraduates into academic majors.

In a semester system where, say, 120 credits are required for graduation, the core should comprise 40 semester credits that focus on "the best that has been written and thought in the world," in words of Matthew Arnold. It should also include mathematics, one year of laboratory science, a year of foreign language, a year of World History, and a semester of Fine Arts. Emphasis here should be on the great books of Western culture since, as John Searle correctly noted,

  ... the arguments given [in defense of the great books in the past]
  were that knowledge of the tradition was essential to the
  self-understanding of educated Americans since this country, in an
  important sense, is the product of that tradition; that many of these
  works are historically important because of their influence; and that
  most of them, for example several works by Plato and Shakespeare, are
  of very high intellectual and artistic quality, to the point of being
  of universal human interest. (13)

In saying this, I would allow that there is no cogent reason to restrict reading to Western classics. What is important is that books that are of seminal importance should be the focus of any coherent undergraduate core requirement. Given the character of undergraduate students, these books must also be accessible and faculty must be prepared to help their students read with understanding. We know this can be done because of phenomena such as the Clemente experiment conducted several years ago in New York City. In this experiment, a number of social "outcasts" and high school dropouts were given the opportunity to read and discuss a rigorous selection of primary sources, chiefly in political theory. One year after the completion of the course "ten of the first sixteen graduates were attending four-year colleges or going to nursing school; four of them had received full scholarships to Bard College. The other graduates were attending community colleges or working full-time--except for one: she had been fired from her job at a fast-food restaurant for trying to start a union." (14)

The culture wars are being fought over the core requirements and it is time to call a truce. Martha Nussbaum was surely correct in noting that it is time for faculty engaged in the "culture wars" to focus attention on a "shared humanistic education for the culture of life. Against the challenge of vocationalism [which should be our main focus], they should be allies rather than opponents." (15)

As mentioned, works of diverse cultures can be included in the core requirement. Indeed, if they can help increase the student's ability to read with understanding and think clearly, they should be included. In addition, if we could guarantee students 40 semester credits of elective courses, we could recommend that students engage in culture studies and read exemplary works by minority and nonwestern authors as elective courses, while taking other courses that would also broaden their intellectual horizons. There is no reason why the "selected electives" could not reflect the perspective of non-Western thinkers and writers.

The greatest challenge to maintaining 40 credits of elective courses will not come from an increase in core requirements, however. That challenge will come from the encroachment of major and ancillary requirements. While it might be difficult to raise the core requirement to 40 credits it would be even more difficult to reduce major requirements to that level. Major credits have a tendency to grow imperceptibly and yet inexorably, as faculty flex their territorial muscles and protect their academic turf. We tend to forget that the vast majority of our students, even our majors, will not go on to graduate schools in our academic field. We need to prepare them for life, not for professional schools.

A liberal education must be both broad and deep. At the very least, this proposal takes us in that direction. It makes job preparation secondary, buried in the major requirements where it belongs, and it asks faculty and students to work together to realize legitimate educational goals. That is to say, it takes students to the point where they can begin, at least, to call their minds their own.

1. C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Princeton, 1990), 23. 2. Robert George, Inside Academe, Vol. VI, No. 2: 4. 3. Paul Trout, "Disengaged Students and the Decline of Academic Standards," Academic Questions, Spring 1997: 46. 4. Jung, ibid. 5. E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (New York, 1988), 6. 6. E.D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need (New York: Anchor Press, 1996), 101. 7. Trout, "Remediation and the Dumbing Down of Campus Standards," Montana Professor, Fall 2001: 4. 8. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life (New York, 1966), 17. 9. Mark Edmondson, "On The Uses of a Liberal Education," Harpers, 1997: 39. 10. Jung, op. cit., 7. 11. Maureen Stout, The Feel-Good Curriculum (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), xi. 12. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York, 1979), 146. 13. John Searle, "The Storm Over the University," in Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Boston, 1994), 82. 14. Earl Shorris, "The Liberal Arts as a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor," Harpers, 1997: 31. 15. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 297.

HUGH MERCER CURTLER is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota.