Core Curriculum at Hopkins: The Affirmative - The Student Discourse

This week we introduce a series of debates about life at Hopkins, The Student Discourse. In this edition, two writers discus the merits of establishing a set of core curriculum at Hopkins.

If you do not know what biological taxonomic kingdom humans belong to, stop reading. If you do not know what the Freudian ego is, stop reading. If you do not know who wrote The Republic, stop reading. Or rather, maybe you should start.

To be fair, it is not your fault. It is not your fault. If I keep repeating myself like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting maybe it will become true - and I bet you all get that reference, especially if you missed the ones above.

Still, too many of us lack experience and knowledge outside of our own respective fields. I bet all biology majors answered the first one with ease, but I am not equally as confident that they were able to identify the last two. I am only slightly poking fun at bio majors; I know you guys are smart. I took Orgo. Students in other majors would have equal difficulty answering a biology question of similar difficulty. But the fact remains that as college students that will (hopefully) graduate from an elite university, we should be well versed in all academic disciplines, and not only limited to our specific major. As of now, we are failing pretty hard.

Look, I am on your side. I like the status quo that lets me take History of Medicine as both a Humanities distribution and writing intensive course. But more than that, I wish high schools were held to a certain standard that required graduating seniors have a basic knowledge in the various academic pursuits. If high school students came to college adequately prepared, we would not need to have our tenured professors impart their insights into Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby here and we could focus on a more specialized and narrow approach.

Sadly, this is not the case. And because kids are not showing up to freshman orientation with an understanding of Pascal's Principle, the derivative of my previous statement becomes important - because students do not gain a basic knowledge in high school, we have an obligation to teach it to them here. Think about it this way: you value your $200,000+ diploma, right? It's important to you that people respect how hard you worked to earn it. Hopkins is one of the most academically challenging universities in the world and you deserve to be acknowledged for your efforts. Do you not think it undermines how people perceive your English diploma when they meet your fellow student who can not accurately attribute "The Wasteland" to T.S. Eliot? Does your history degree seem somehow less impressive when your fellow student thinks that the "Rape of Nanking" happened in the back room of a massage parlor? I know I feel like my Political Science background seems tremulous at best when I meet a student who can not name 10 U.S. Presidents (the exchange usually goes as follows: "uhh, Obama, Bush, Washington, uhh Jefferson, umm John Franklin Kennedy, Lincoln, and uhh, umm.... wait, hold on..." at which point I can not help but reveal my disappointment: "You have got to be kidding me").

There is a certain level of knowledge we should have acquired upon our graduation, if for no other reason than so that we do not make fools of ourselves at dinner parties. I know we have distribution requirements currently. We need something like 20 distribution credits and 12 credits of writing intensive courses or whatever. I only care insofar as I complete my graduation clearance.

However, these weak attempts at making students more rounded individuals usually end up with students staying in major for their W credits where the quality of writing expected and the demands of the classes are often, though not always, diminished. For example, I got an E credit for Environment and Your Health, an upper level Public Health course. It was definitely not an engineering course and it was definitely not heavily contingent on my math skills. So instead of using these distribution requirements to drift away from our respective comfort zones, students are just taking advantage of the system; we are using the distribution classes as a way to get an "easy A." The policy rewards students who stumble into a course like Intro to Business instead of students who challenge themselves to delve into economic theory.

So if we are going to do this (and we have to do this unless the current failures of the American high school education are addressed), we should do it right and establish a core curriculum. Let's actually mold well-rounded students who can hold their own in any discussion. Again, I wish we did not have to do this here, I would love to single-mindedly pursue my chosen academic discipline, forsaking the physical sciences and their cohorts, but the high schools are failing. I constantly meet freshmen who can mot tell me the plotline of Macbeth and can not recall the name of the captain in Melville's Moby Dick. They can not tell the difference between plant and animal cells. They can not identify the causes of World War I.

And until they are able to do these things, it is our job to ensure that they learn them here.