The Importance of General Education

A significant part of my long ago undergraduate years at the University of Utah was the number of array of general education courses required for a B.S. degree in Psychology. Part of the significance - apparent at the time - was caught up in the number our courses and breadth of disciplines involved. Even though a considerable degree of choice was involved, students still had to sample courses from field quite apart from a major or even a minor. An even bigger part of the significant, lost on me at the time, but enormously apparent a decade or more later, was the added value conferred by exposure to subjects that I didn't know I needed to know.So it should come as no surprise that this item from InsideHigherEd.com caught my eye. In the article, Colleen Flaherty describes ongoing efforts by Harvard and Duke Universities to revamp their vaunted general education programs. The latest Duke proposal describes a battery of learning expectations:

• Communicate compellingly.
• Understand other languages, cultures and civilizations, past and present.
• Understand different forms of scientific thought and evidence.
• Understand creative products of the human imagination.
• Evaluate, manage and interpret information.

Exactly! What a terrific framework for 21st Century gen ed. Independent and international schools should take note.