Monkeys, Hula Hooping, and the Death of General Education

Pretend for a moment that you are starting your freshman year at Harvard University. You are excited about the college experience and ready to tackle the demanding coursework. You have decided on a major: Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, while also fulfilling a portion of your elective credits with a minor in Ethnicity, Migration, Rights.

You have already reviewed the general education requirements and chosen your courses for the fall semester. Now, you take another look at your selected courses with nervous anticipation.

An expository writing course. Typical.

A foreign language course. Also typical.

The Border: Race, Politics, and Health in Modern Mexico. Sounds intriguing.

Video Game Storytelling. Very excited to take this course.

College students want to have fun, and universities like Harvard make that possible in the classroom. But prioritizing “fun” over rigor is to the students’ own detriment. Harvard’s general education courses cover a wide variety of topics ranging from entertainment and pop culture to liberal politics. Under this system, students can choose to avoid reading classic works of literature, studying American history, and/or learning advanced math and science. But the nonsense in general education is not limited to one’s introduction to college.

Let’s say that after a successful first semester, you return to Harvard after Christmas break, excited about your new courses. Along with another semester of expository writing and another semester of a foreign language, you are taking a general education course titled “Dogs in Science, Society, and the Modern World.” You are also enrolled in the course “Anime as Global Popular Culture.”

For sophomore year, you enroll in courses for your major and minor. You also complete your final general education courses:

• Culture, Inequality and Inclusion in the United States and Beyond
• Monkey Style: Primate Social Behavior
• Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory
• Data Science for the Social Sciences

During junior year, all your courses go toward completing your major and minor. Senioritis hits hard the next year. You finish all your major and minor courses, but you still need to complete some more open elective credits in order to graduate. You browse through the course offerings and choose classes you will probably enjoy:

• Queer Archives
• Black Feminist Theory Seminar
• Indigenous Sci Fi, Horror, Fantasy, and Futurisms

Even at elite universities such as Harvard, students have the option to fulfill their general education requirements by learning about video games, monkeys, anime, and leftist ideology. In addition to charging students high tuition fees for a sub-par general education curriculum, Harvard and many other private universities benefit from taxpayer money through government funding.

Public universities, funded directly by taxpayers, are no better than private universities when it comes to general education programs. For example, a student at NC State University can complete half of their general education requirements with the following selection of courses:

• Introduction to Hula Hooping
• Indoor Group Cycling
• American Popular Culture
• Global History of American Food and Drink
• Mega-Events, Sport, and Tourism
• Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Genre
• Race in U.S. Politics
• An Introduction to the Honey Bee and Beekeeping

This is hardly unique to NC State. Students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) can satisfy general education requirements with courses such as “Aliens, Psychics, and Ghosts,” “Drama of Diversity,” and “Music and Religion in Popular Culture.” The Ohio State University offers general education courses on “Understanding Television,” “Introduction to Popular Cultures,” and “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in the United States, 1940-Present.” Texas A&M University offers general education courses on “Popular Culture in Modern China,” “Aesthetics of Activism,” and “Feminist Approaches to Science, Technology, and Medicine.”

In the current landscape of higher education, typical general education requirements are overly broad and lack rigor. Not only do they include a litany of unnecessary courses, but they are also missing the material needed to cultivate good citizenship or develop essential skills for the workplace. A standardized general education curriculum can solve this problem by removing nonessential courses and requiring all students to take courses that will actually help them.

Universities owe it to both their students and taxpayers to critically evaluate their general education programs. By improving general education, universities can better fulfill their responsibility to provide a well-rounded education that equips students for success after graduation.

Elizabeth Chen was a research and operations intern for the Martin Center. She is a senior at Patrick Henry College.