Trends in General Education:An Interview with the President of the National Association of Scholars

By James S. Panero | Wednesday, May 15, 1996

Editor's note: Steven Balch, a Ph.D in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, has been President of the National Association of Scholars since 1987. The NAS is the nation's largest higher education reform group, made up of academics and located in Princeton, NJ. The NAS has just released their results from a four-year long study of historical trends in liberal arts curricula. This study, called The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993, can be obtained from the NAS for $12.

The Dartmouth Review: How did you approach your study, The Dissolution of General Education: 1914-1993?

Professor Steven Balch: We took the institutions whose undergraduate programs were rated the top 50 in 1989 by US News and World Report. We looked at the general education programs for a Bachelor in Arts degree in each of those institutions for each of four years: 1914, 1939, 1964, and 1993.

Review: What did you discover?

Balch: We found this: from 1914 through 1964, virtually all of the institutions had highly structured general education programs. These were designed to compel or at least encourage students to take a fairly broad sampling of introductory courses in major subject areas. That is to say, the intent of the structure of these programs was to give students a fairly well rounded intellectual framework before they proceeded on to more specialized academic endeavors.

Review: How did institutions structure their general education programs?

Balch: There were often mandatory courses that everyone had to take, or sometimes the institutions clustered a group of introductory courses in related areas. The institutions also had a very high percentage of courses with prerequisites attached to them, specific prerequisites, so that there just weren't many courses that an individual could take without any earlier preparation.

Review: So although institutions might not have a Core Curriculum per se, students still had to take a 'core' set of courses?

Balch: That's right. You couldn't escape it, given the small number of courses and the high number of prerequisites. You had colleges that might only have 150-200 courses and 90% of these had prerequisites.

Review: When did the real shift happen?

Balch: Between 1964 and 1993 you see a change: a dissolution in structure, a great multiplication in the number of courses, a very substantial diminution in the number of courses that have prerequisites. The average number of courses in the catalogue that didn't have prerequisites was only 23 per institution in 1914. In 1993 it was up to 582 on average per institution.

You see the virtual disappearance of mandatory courses outside of a foreign language requirement. You also see the virtual disappearance of clusters. What you'll find instead are these huge distribution categories, typically common in pairs of three.

The standard configuration is the humanities distribution, the social science distribution, and natural science/mathematics distribution. Within those, again, are a very large number of courses for students to choose from.

We also took a look at the number of schools that had specific kinds of requirements, whether or not it was a mandatory course or a cluster.

Between '64 and '93 the number of institutions that have a specific history requirement goes from 38% to 12%, the number of institutions that have a specific literature requirement, from 38% to 14%.

Review: Between '64 and '93, what brought about that historic change in the emphasis on curriculum?

Balch: I would say the major factor was probably the research interest of professors. You also had in the 60's and early 70's increasing demands that the curriculum not be a vehicle of coercion. Students had rights. They had rights to choose the path that they would take. A special knowledge and wisdom belonged to youth.

You know that the university has generally been thought of as a place where knowledge is handed down from one generation to another. But in the 1960's a notion emerged that the primitive and the untutored was better. The universities and colleges found it very difficult to stand up to this libertarian spirit. But, as I said, that was combined with a very healthy dose of professorial self-interest.

One final reason: more people — especially since WWII — have sought an education not to be broadly educated, or to lead some notion of a gentlemanly or ladylike life, but pragmatically to gain a passport to the upper-middle class. They don't want to be bothered with the frills and finery. They want to concentrate on stuff that they feel is most professionally relevant. They want a curriculum that does not side track them into subjects that seem esoteric. They want to learn about what will help them make a buck.

Review: What are the arguments for a system of distribution requirements over a core curriculum?

Balch: One argument I hear is that the most important thing about education is not learning a particular content, but learning how to think. The best way to encourage critical thinking and sharpen thinking skills is to allow students to study the subjects that they like best. An open curriculum affords that possibility.

Others feel that education should be tailored to the individual, that there are all sorts of learning styles. There are differences in learning style, the argument goes, differences in learner interest, and a non-structured curriculum is more likely to accommodate these differences.

It's obvious, at least to me, that an unstructured curriculum has lots of advantages for institutions. The first advantage is that it makes life easier for students. It's also more accommodating of professorial interests. One of the things that's been happening since the middle of the century is the shift away from advancement on the basis of being a good teacher within your institution. Now the goal is to become a member of a wider professional group and to be a good researcher. If career success depends on research accomplishment, then faculty have a strong incentive to specialize. In order to specialize in research, it's certainly easier if you are specialized in teaching.

Review: How do you counter these arguments for distributive requirements?

Balch: First is student need. Most of our students, and I think that this is even true at elite institutions like Dartmouth, come in with nowhere near the preparation they really need. For the most part I think they have a good deal less preparation in terms of academic strengths than they had thirty years before. We are preparing people at our leading institutions to go forth into the world and to be leaders. I don't think we can feel very secure in the realization that our future leaders, whatever walk of life they may happen to find themselves in, are not going to understand the fundamentals of their society and their civilization.

But even if you set all that aside, that kind of a traditional gentleman's concept of a liberal education, we have to produce a generation of people who can sustain our society. Prosperity, security, freedom, are not the norms for human existence in this world. They are aspects of life that have been brought to a very high peak of development in the Western world in the last few centuries. Even if it gave nothing to individual satisfaction, I think it would be very important to ensure that we had an adequate liberal education, one that provided this essential framework. Just for that reason alone.

Review: It is argued that we can learn these values from other cultures just as easily. Why not study them instead?

Balch: Even if you were not prepared to concede anything to the West, I think that on sort of a dispassionate view of the world you'd have to come to the conclusion that Western civilization is far more influential than any other. Not only here in the United States, but all around the globe.

Come back in three or four hundred years and perhaps the Confucian strains of far Eastern civilizations will have developed and spread out and will permeate the world. But right now it's clear, just in terms of the facts of the world, that the dominant traditions, institutions, and practices come from the Western tradition.

Review: At Dartmouth we now have a more specialized faculty than ever. Students have more courses to choose from than ever. Why isn't this better? Won't students have more to talk about with other students if they take different courses?

Balch: For common ground, it seems to me you have something to talk about if there is a common experience. You're really giving the mirror image of one of the common arguments for a core. Discussion seems to take place among people who share some ideas and some interest, and some fund of knowledge. I would think a healthy mix of core curriculum and specialization would allow students to develop that base in common and then go on to develop their specialties.

Review: Do you think we should revert to a more structured core curriculum?

Balch: In general, yes. I think there has to be more emphasis on the heart and soul of education, the liberal education.

Review: How does one improve the curriculum, then?

Balch: I would say that one thing can be done — create some kind of alternate program of education. Whereby, as Jeff Hart has in fact done with his booklet 'How to Get a College Education,' you recommend to a student how to touch on the major bases of a liberal arts education within the confines of an institution's existing curriculum.

That kind of thing , I think, can be attempted by groups of faculty and others who want to take the first big step toward re-invigorating the concept and practice of liberal general education. I think it's practical to do it almost anywhere.

Trends in General Education:An Interview with the President of the National Association of Scholars

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