To add or subtract?

The burning issue of the day for tertiary-level educators and government officials is, of course, whether or not to add or subtract years from college education.

It may make us feel better to know that this is a problem not only for us, but also for educators in other countries.

I mentioned in an earlier column the proposal by a former Tennessee education secretary to the American Council on Education to reduce the number of undergraduate years in American universities from four to three. Americans want to copy the British model.

Here, on the other hand, is one of our neighbors going the other way. Right now, college takes only three years in Hong Kong, which uses the British model. By 2012, Hong Kong will add one year of general education to extend college by one year. The British, at least in Hong Kong, want to copy the American model.

The British themselves in Britain do not always follow the British model. The University of Oxford, for example, offers the standard three-year undergraduate course for Classics and English. If the student is not yet ready for college, however, a preliminary year (what we would call Pre-Baccalaureate or Pre-University) is required, making the course in effect a four-year course. The extra year, however, is not for general education, but for languages (Latin or Greek, needless to say).

In the Philippines, we follow, though not strictly, the American model. We should know, therefore, the American justification for general education. The worst thing we can do is to have general education just because the Americans have it.

Why do Americans have general education in college when the rest of the world does not?

A good explanation was given in 2004 by Yale University president Richard Levin to incoming freshmen. “Why,” he asked, “is the undergraduate curriculum, at Yale as at other leading American universities, structured as it is – with two years of broad, general education followed by two years focused largely on one subject?”

He answered his own question: “During your first two years here, you will have the opportunity to explore a broad range of subjects, choosing among literally hundreds of courses throughout the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences that have no or few prerequisites. Indeed, you will be required to distribute your courses such that you cannot specialize prematurely. Only when you choose a major field of study, at the end of your second year, will you be required to concentrate a significant portion of your courses in one area, and only then will you be required to take certain specific courses, rather than choose among electives.”

“This distinctively American approach to undergraduate education,” he admitted, “is not the prevailing pattern in most other countries with strong universities. In most of Europe and in China, students choose their major field of study when they apply for admission. Once admitted, they do not have the freedom that you have to test your interest in a wide variety of subjects; they specialize immediately. Similarly, in much of the world, students choose a profession in their final year of secondary school; they begin the study of law and medicine as first year undergraduates.”

He stressed that the concept of general education has changed: “The freedom to explore in the first two years hasn’t always been a feature of undergraduate education in America. Until the middle of the 19th century, there were very few elective courses at Yale and other leading American colleges. Everyone in Yale College took a common set of courses focused on classical Greek and Latin, science, mathematics and philosophy, and the vast majority of students in law and medical schools entered directly from secondary school. The expansion of the number of elective courses, the requirement that students choose a major after two years of general study, and the definition of professional schools as postgraduate institutions evolved gradually during the 50 years following the Civil War.

“The most eloquent justification for a broad, unspecialized and non-vocational undergraduate curriculum is found in a report written by Yale’s President Jeremiah Day in 1828. At the core of Day’s argument was the belief, which we at Yale share today, that your education should equip you to think independently and critically, and to respond flexibly to new information, altering your view of the world as appropriate.”

What we have in the Philippines, then, is a mongrel: students choose their majors when they apply for admission to college (the British model), but we still have general education in college (the American model).

Here is the key to the issue of general education: the first two years of college, if we are going to have them at all, should not have any required subjects, should not have any skills courses, and should not include any major courses.

Although I helped craft the General Education Curriculum (GEC) for CHED, I now have very serious reservations about it. I think that the GEC as it now stands properly belongs to high school, not to college. (To be continued)