Do General Education Requirements = Liberal Arts? Reflections on the Open Curriculum

By Lisa Phillips
Sports Editor
Published Fall 2009

This year marks the switch to an open curriculum at Kalamazoo College, without the majority of general education requirements.

The one criticism that I’ve heard time and again is that this switch is eroding at our liberal arts identity. How can we claim to ocffer students a liberal arts education without requiring a spectrum of classes from different disciplines? Isn’t the very essence of liberal arts about broadening one’s knowledge in all areas, rather than merely taking classes in one’s interests?

I certainly agree that a liberal arts education is about more than just taking classes that fit your career or tailor to your passions. It’s about learning to critically think and expanding one’s knowledge of the world, and this is undoubtedly done through classes both inside and outside of one’s area of study. I still remember when, as a first-year Political Science major, I took “19th Century Art” to fulfill my history credit. This class challenged me beyond any of my other classes that year – I had no idea how to analyze art. But I emerged with a newfound appreciation of both Impressionism and the discipline in general, one that continues on today. This is at the very heart of what a liberal arts education should do.

However, the essential point missing is that this still can be done with the new curriculum. Students still can choose to take a wide range of classes. It’s just a matter of convincing them that they should do so.

Right now, from what I’ve seen, many students are not convinced. I still remember when we seniors found out last spring that we could switch to the new curriculum. Cries of “Thank goodness I don’t have to take that dreaded science class!” were rampant. Many students used it to avoid a discipline that they just couldn’t get themselves to take a class in. They were missing the point of the liberal arts education, and they’ve been at a liberal arts institution for three years now.

How can we say, even before the switch, that we were a liberal arts college? Shouldn’t students at a liberal arts college understand what is at the very essence of liberal arts? Even when we required students to take classes in different disciplines, many students didn’t approach this with the idea that this was valuable to their intellectual growth, but rather that they had to do so.

Thus, I believe that the open curriculum is an opportunity to strengthen our liberal arts identity rather than diminish it. It gives us an imperative to explain our liberal arts values to our students, instead of merely requiring them to take general education requirements without explaining why. Now, as students choose their education path, we as a college now have an urgency to convince them what a liberal arts education means and why a variety of classes is important.

In our career-oriented world, this certainly isn’t easy. It may mean more advising, more discussion of the value of liberal arts, more coordination between disciplines; what else, I don’t know. But we as a college should take this curriculum switch as a challenge. Let’s make ourselves known as a liberal arts institution not through requirements that are meaningless to students, but through a learning philosophy that the whole student body understands.