As the faculty prepare to discuss and possibly even vote on distribution requirement changes this Friday, as a community, I encourage us to reflect on what we mean by “liberal arts” education. What is it that we, the Middlebury community, seek to achieve here?
Though 2015 Vermont is not Ancient Greece, when considering a term’s modern usage it is sometimes helpful to consider original usage. The liberal arts once described the necessary skills for active participation in Classical Greek and Hellenistic civic society. While participation in our modern society may require different specific skills, the ideals that these arts represent remain essential for contemporary, cosmopolitan, civic engagement.
The three original humanities (rhetoric, grammar and logic) cultivated critical thinking and precise communication, while the sciences (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) promoted beauty, ultimate knowledge and contemplation of man’s place in a broader universe. Middlebury doesn’t stray too far from these ideals.
According to our student handbook, Middlebury, as a liberal arts institution, “challenge[s] students to participate fully in a vibrant and diverse academic community” and “connect[s] our community to other places, countries and cultures.” We “cultivate the intellectual, creative, physical, ethical and social qualities essential for leadership in a rapidly changing global community.”
But Middlebury rejects the original liberal arts, instead requiring students to learn an arbitrary set of distribution requirements that fail to meet the lofty goals Middlebury sets. The current system of distribution requirements (both the academic categories and Cultures & Civilization requirements) are impractical and improperly designed.
Beginning with the Cultures & Civilizations requirements, since they often receive the blunt of criticism on this campus, I agree that AAL has got to go. I disagree with the Middlebury students who wish to divide it up into LAT, ASI, MED, OCE, PPQ, and whatever other acronyms have been suggested for artificially designated regions of the world. Cultures & Civilizations are not too narrowly defined; they’re much too broad.
The proposal to divide AAL up, and any decision on which regions of the world are necessary to learn, is inherently problematic. No division of the world is perfect. Should we require Oceania, even though we offer almost no courses on that region? If AAL lumps too many cultures together, does an Asia requirement really solve that problem? In other words, do Japan, Siberia, Turkmenistan and India share the same culture? Is Mexico part of Latin America or North America (one of these being a cultural distinction and the other a geographic one)? Where does a course on Turkey or the Caucasus fall?
Geographic divisions of the world will always be controversial and never achieve global literacy. Take Europe, for example. Does a course on Ancient Greece tell me anything about today’s Scandinavia or Moorish Spain? No. It doesn’t. Teaching complete global literacy is impossible, and no set of geographic or cultural distribution requirements will ever achieve this goal. Requiring students to take one course each on any number of haphazardly determined regions is silly, and achieves little actual knowledge in exchange for great breadth of surface-level engagement.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our distribution requirements could encourage us to seek depth in our education instead of breadth. Rather than forcing students to know a little about a lot of regions, we could require them to know a lot about just one region. Students should have the opportunity to define a culture of study that is not their major and prove that they’ve taken enough courses relating to that culture to acquire some level of cultural literacy.
For example, a student might combine the study of Russian language, literature and Soviet-era politics to prove that she has learned something about 20th century Russia. Letting students focus intensely on one region will lead to students who are actually able to engage critically with another culture. In our current system, students are lucky if they graduate with loosely defined opinions about randomly chosen and unrelated places.
In a similar manner, our academic categories of distribution requirements are also undesirable. The bar for entry in many disciplines is simply too high to gain much from a single course. Taking one introductory science course, for example, doesn’t achieve the intended goal of the SCI requirement: teaching students “the methods used to gather, interpret and evaluate data critically, and the placement of this information into a larger context.” Students simply do not gain enough information or skills in a single course to critically evaluate anything in any context, large or small.
In a similar manner, a single LIT course is unlikely to produce much progress towards gaining “insight into the minds and lives of other human beings, both [our] own cultural predecessors and people of different traditions, and into the process whereby human experience is imaginatively transformed into art.” That requires context and comparison, something gained from a study of literature that does more than scratch the surface. No one can seriously maintain that a single course, amidst a completely unrelated course of study, will achieve this effect.
Instead, I propose a depth model similar to that which I proposed for replacing the Cultures & Civilizations requirements. Break the curriculum into three or four greater areas, say, the humanities, the sciences and the social sciences (and maybe languages as a separate area of study). Encourage students to take three courses in each, preferably in the same discipline within that area.
Imagine if Classics majors, after taking three Chemistry courses, decided to minor in Chemistry because they actually reached interesting and engaging material. Physics majors might study three literature courses and discover a passion for Shakespearean England, leading to cross-disciplinary study on Renaissance Europe. Of course such courses of study might occur from time to time under our current system. But the requirements to take a single course across eight categories implies that (1) one course is sufficient to understand a broad field of study, and (2) breadth of education is better than depth.
The liberal arts have always prepared students for civic engagement by providing them with actual skills in critical thinking and communication and teaching cultural fluency. Today’s society encompasses greater territorial expanse and cultural differences than the society of Ancient Greece. This doesn’t mean we should overextend ourselves. It is just as important as ever that our liberal arts educations prepare us to engage with both our own and other cultures. It’s time for our distribution requirements to reflect that goal.
Eliminate AAL (& All Our Other Current Requirements)
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