I took five classes during senior year of high school: Advanced Placement American history, AP calculus, AP music theory, New Testament Bible (en Español) and chorus. In other words, from August 2000 until May 2001, I furthered my knowledge of the American judicial system, differential equations, the Phrygian mode, crossword puzzles -- yeah, we didn't do much in Bible -- and even singing.
Since then I have taken about 35 classes at Northwestern, and I can safely say that the things I've learned have very little to do with most of those 35 classes.
Sure, my writing classes have improved my fiction, I know the basics of direct marketing and I can understand written French. But what about the Periodic Table? And how come all I definitively know about economics after intro to micro and intro to macro is that supply slopes up and demand slopes down?
This is the plight of the non-premed, non-Techie at a liberal arts college. Future doctors and engineers still know things -- important, intelligent things. I know where commas go, which will neither cure cancer nor revolutionize the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
I'm happy. I just wish I'd retained some other knowledge, too. I wish I knew how to use the TI-83 I mastered at 15. I wish I could tell you the first thing about classics or physics.
We are getting vocational training in our majors with just occasional exceptions when we have to take that formal studies or values distro. Political science majors are killer fact machines and actually understand politics, but what about German? And does the average German major remember what the 12th Amendment did?
The quarter system doesn't help. In theory a liberal arts education introduces us to a number of fields and forces us to study varying subjects -- remember distros?
But in 10 weeks, how much can a college student really commit to memory? The only thing I remember about the linguistics class I took freshman year is my professor's crazy hair. And when I didn't have to take another linguistics class, I forgot it all. The knowledge wasn't needed the next quarter, so I didn't use it and I lost it. I wasn't adding to my knowledge base, I was flipping the "on" switch to a cranial dual-directional vacuum that makes my brain suck in short-term info while shoving out things like chemistry and how to wake up before 10 a.m.
Skipping distros with AP/IB doesn't help either, as many of us don't have to take classes in math, foreign languages or sciences. And when we do take them, we take the easy ones.
It's not that we aren't motivated. We just have to focus on our majors, our sports, our shows and the rest of our lives. That's where we learn other things: how to shop for a bed, how to correctly wear a scarf -- thanks Minnesotans from my freshman seminar! -- how to build sets and hang lights, how to write grant proposals, how to get jobs (in theory).
And though somewhat detrimental to the university's endeavor to make us academic Renaissance men and women, the rest of our lives is what matters more.
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