University of Virginia Library

A Time To Learn

Few, if any, of the proposals by the
College's Curriculum Evaluation Committee
have caused as much controversy as the
Committee's decision to replace the old
required courses with a new requirement that
College students take one of a choice of
courses in disciplinary areas. Thus, according
to the report, students will no longer be
required to take a math and a science course.
They will have to choose six hours from a
variety of introductory courses in the
scientific field; similarly, College students will
no longer by required to take a second year of
English; rather, they will have a choice
between second-year English and a selection
of introductory "humanities" courses such as
Art, Music, etc.

In changing the requirements, the
Committee recognized that the present
requirements simply force a first-year man to
retain a certain body of specialized knowledge
long enough to pass an exam and to quickly
forget it thereafter. No one who took Biology
and then dropped science studies, for
instance, remembers the phyla of algae at
graduation; few who passed Spanish 6 and
never went on can read or speak Spanish at
even a rudimentary level three years later.

Students have been especially critical of
the Committee for keeping any form of
requirements, for it is the student who knows
just how wasted his time in required courses
has been. And in reaction to that waste,
students have asked in some cases that all
specific course requirements for a College
degree be eliminated. In this request they are
being as short-sighted as the Committee was
when it made its proposals.

The problem with the Committee was that,
while it recognized the desirability of
exposure to different methods of academic
thought, it either failed to recognize, or failed
to do anything about, the utter inadequacy of
the present course structure to deal with that
necessity.

Most introductory courses are designed not
to be valuable in themselves, but to provide
students who wish to go further in the
discipline with a solid background; this results
from departments' natural eagerness to insure
that potential majors have a rigorous
introduction to the field. This is fine for the
potential major. But it leaves the student who
takes the course only because it is required
out in the cold. And merely enabling a
student to choose among a greater number of
inadequate courses is not going to solve the
problem. Nor is elimination of all
requirements going to be of service to the
students.

What is needed is an interdepartmental
course composed of offerings from most or all
of the departments in each area, united by a
common theme. Thus instead of forcing the
student to choose Biology I, or Chemistry I,
etc., all of the science departments could
cooperate in offering a course on, for
example, Man's Relation to the Environment.
Biologists could teach a section on the
relationship between pollution and disease,
geologists could teach a section on
conservation of dwindling mineral resources,
etc. Similarly, under the Humanities
requirement, the departments involved could
work up a course on appreciation of various
facets of Western Culture - philosophy,
music, art, and literature.

Such a program would not preclude the
student's developing an interest in a subject
and going on to more specialized courses. It
would not, obviously, impart any real
expertise. But it might be interesting, it would
expose the student to different methods of
thought, and he might learn something of use
to him, rather than something he memorizes,
regurgitates, and forgets.