To: General Education Development Task Force
From: Stephen Bowen, Chair
Date: January 24, 1998

I thought it might help our discussion on Friday if I provided a summary of the different types of overall goals universities set for general education. There are differences. They tend to overlap, but they are also distinctive in one sense or another. The summary below includes many of the visions currently being discussed, but I'm sure it is not all-inclusive.

A common overall goal of general education programs in the past has been to transmit culture and traditions. Graduates needed to know and be able to use the intellectual foundations of their culture as they developed principled lives as leaders and professionals. Fifty years ago, a well educated lawyer was expected to be able to justify a stance in terms of a classical moral concept such as Aristotle's golden mean. Despite our having hit the deconstructionist iceberg in the 70's and the ensuing "culture wars" of the 80's, this remains a very common and vigorously defended overall goal of general education. It can be combined with some of the other overall goals below.

A view most commonly associated with the corporate world is that general education must provide graduates with the education needed to succeed as a member of a large organization. This view advocates emphasis on communication skills; teamwork, leadership, and other interpersonal skills; knowledge of the contexts of work - economic and business, cultural and social, and environmental. Ford motor company has a table of 12 attributes they want to see develop in their employees, and only one of these has to do with technical competence. Corporate advisors to MTU often stress the importance of what they expect students to learn in general education. However, the corporate view is not necessarily the same as the business view. Small businesses (<20 employees) in particular tend to be interested in technical competence and much less interested in other educational objectives.

The cultivation of humanity in each student is the overall goal proposed for some programs of general education. Emphasis is given to moral reasoning, understanding oneself and ones relationships to others, society and the universe. Although this may sound like the domain of private institutions with religious affiliations, in fact many public universities adopt this vision. One public university structures its general education around the concept of responsible citizenship, a variation on the theme. There is renewed interest in "cultivation of humanity" in response to the putative materialistic, passionless, and self-interested values of today's students.

"Life-long learning" is a phrase that appears somewhere in most catalog descriptions of general education programs. Sometimes it is discussed in the very important but pedestrian sense of continuing education to keep your job skills sharpened. More ambitiously, it means learning and internalizing the values of the tradition of scholarship - developing a passion for learning and critical reasoning, etc. Relevant to how curricula are developed for both "life long learning" and "cultivation of humanity", some universities have viewed their general education programs as a marketing tool and try to make it "fun". Others consider it should be seriously challenging and profoundly disturbing so that young minds are forged on the anvil of human experience integrated over three millennia.

From a simple, functional point of view, some universities divide their goals for general education into two parts: development of baccalaureate level skills in communication and quantitative analysis, and breadth of

knowledge. The latter is viewed as giving balance to the student's education, which is otherwise mostly taken up with specialization in the major. There are no overarching goals or rationale. This is pretty much our program, in practice.

The last point has to do with the relationship between the priorities of general education and the priorities of professional programs such as engineering. In the past, liberal arts and professions have shared scholastic traditions but emphasized different content. Liberal arts programs educated their students for lives of disciplined reflection - professional programs for lives of disciplined practice. Today, the priorities of these two groups as discussed in many circles are converging. Because more than 50% of all high school graduates now go on to post-secondary education, a relatively small proportion of university graduates will find lives of disciplined reflection an adequate source of income. At the same time, disciplined practice on its own is often found to be an inadequate basis for a fulfilling and productive life, either professional or private. So some of the faculty in both traditions have realized that they need each other to meet the needs of their students. Last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., I attended a special session of efforts of liberal arts programs and professional programs to build stronger bridges through general education. There were no general themes or conclusions I could identify, apart from the fact that the merger is going to require imagination and compromise from both sides, but the commitment to progress appeared firm.