168 Teaching Minds

168 Teaching Minds Whenever you see a required course in a departmental major, there is politics behind it. Someone has traded with someone else. If you make them take my course, then I will vote to make them take your course. It is how requirements are created at every school. No one is thinking of the students’ needs, trust me. So what if we did think of the students’ needs? What would we do in the third and fourth years of college? It seems obvious that students would like to learn some job skills and that they would like to be able to pick subjects that interested them for further study. In addition, they might have found something that they were working on in the first 2 years that made them want to get better at it. This is what the rest of college should look like then. For computer science, for example, students should get to select software engineering, as suggested by my colleague earlier, if they want to be employable, and they should be able to improve cogni- tive skills that they may have acquired in the first 2 years. They may not have studied various subspecialties in computer science, so they should get to choose the ones that interest them. They also may have an interest in pursuing some noncomputer-related subjects taught at the university, for their own edification. In other words, they get to choose and the choices should include job skills and continued use of the cognitive processes they have honed in the first 2 years. Faculty simply should offer choices, and students should pick. What would happen if this were done? In a world where students got to decide what they studied, many of the departments listed above would disappear. There might be some call for Near Eastern languages or art history, but not that much. These departments exist for historical reasons and universities are reluctant to get rid of them, so universities make requirements that students take courses in them. An enormous English department is justified only by the sense that universities ought to have that sort of thing and by continuing English literature requirements for students. Without that, such departments would be much smaller than they are. Therefore, it is clear that this cannot happen. What could happen is this: High schools could change and col- leges would have to adapt. This is possible because high school does not have to be the way it is today. Its current organization around academic subjects makes no sense. This can be fixed by simply build- ing different kinds of high school curricula. But how can we change high school? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023914