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Core distinctions
Concepts such as taste and judgment get a bad rap in our increasingly relativistic society. And nowhere are the consequences of that bad rap more visible than in higher education. As ACTA showed in The Hollow Core, the core curriculum is out. It is simply no longer a given that colleges and universities should guide students in their studies, ensuring that they acquire a strong, solid grounding in foundational subjects as well as that they develop a coherent, in-depth knowledge of their concentration.
In place of the core has come almost endless choice. At most schools, students still must satisfy broad distribution requirements--but the range of courses that will fulfill those requirements is so huge, and so undifferentiated, that students are almost certain to have a scattered, fragmented educational experience. The core is associated with an old-fashioned, stodgy way of doing things; it is associated with value judgments and discriminating distinctions that assume some subjects matter more than others. In the post-modern university, such distinctions are regarded as morally suspect. Consequently a course on hip hop may be valued the same as a course on Shakespeare, American history, or classical philosophy. This "anything goes" atmosphere certainly caters to students' personal preferences (something colleges are wont to do in an era of skyrocketing tuition costs). But it practically guarantees that students will not approach their studies systematically, and as such does little to help them acquire knowledge and develop tastes that will benefit them throughout their lives.
This is the point made by Education Sector's Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed. Carey recently went music shopping in Montreal, where his visit to a selective CD store provided a powerful analogy for how colleges and universities disserve students when they offer all the choices in the world but do nothing to help students choose well.
Carey begins by explaining how a music store that deliberately does not carry as much music as possible can stay in business:
... the challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgment and taste, which only people can provide. The value of the Montreal CD store was as much in the albums that weren't on sale as in those that were. In that context, only using 20% of your floor space makes a lot of sense.
[...]
The store also had a single wall rack that took this principle to even further extremes. While the rack was built to hold CDs about 10 deep, only the first three rows were in use. They were devoted exclusively to the gods and giants--Hendrix, Bowie, Neil Young, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen (this being Canada), the New York Dolls, etc. ...
Moreover, the CD store wasn't just selling the standard "essentials" catalogue for each artist. Instead, there was a carefully selected combination of iconic works, under-appreciated studio albums (i.e. Axis: Bold as Love), obscure concerts, BBC session outtakes, etc. It was pretty cool.
Carey then moves on to explain that the business plan of the discriminating music shop can tell us a lot about how what higher education is doing wrong:
Thanks to Kevin Carey for his inspired--and hip--explanation.What, you may ask, does this have to do with higher education?
Beyond the obvious point that Hendrix appreciation is a higher education in and of itself, this CD store embodied the promise--and in many cases, the failure--of the undergraduate curriculum at the contemporary American university.
In some ways, universities went through all this a long time ago. While recorded music wasn't widely available until the mid-20th century, recorded words have been in circulation since Guttenberg. But even until recently, universities were judged by their prowess in storing and providing access to information, embodied in statistics like the number of books and journal subscriptions held by the library. They're still judged by the percentage of professors with PhDs--information stored in human form.
But these assets are--and really, always were--essentially irrelevant to the needs of your average undergraduate. Those students don't need access--they need taste. In other words, they need the university to apprehend the vast array of human knowledge and make some very smart, considered judgments about where to start and where to focus in building an education. They need the equivalent of the CD rack of gods and giants for the realm of ideas instead of music.
Unfortunately, most big universities moved away from this kind of core curriculum a long time ago. Instead they set students loose in the equivalent of Tower Records, with instructions that amount to "Buy at least one CD from Rock/Pop, Jazz, Classical, Soul / R&B, Folk, and Country. Then pick one of those categories and buy 10 more CDs from that section, plus another 10 from that section or any others."
In fact, it's worse than that, because universities are more limited than Tower in terms of what they can offer, and their offerings tend to skew toward what the faculty want to teach, not what students need to learn. It's like the above scenario, except there are only 50 CDs in each section, selected by a socially maladjusted record store clerk who looks down on the clerks in charge of the other sections (who feel the same way about him) and who has decided that the 50 albums in Rock/Pop will include the complete Yngvie Malmsteen catalogue, but not Exile on Main Street.
This doesn't mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.
In the information age, access is not an end in itself. And choice is very far from the self-evident virtue that it often is taken to be. Students drown in options if they don't get proper guidance--and their educations suffer as a result. Information management is a skill we all need today--and colleges and universities have an obligation to structure undergraduate education to help students differentiate between courses they need and those they don't.
As Bruce Springsteen would say, sometimes we learn "more from a three-minute record ... than we ever learned in school."
Posted by acta online on June 02, 2007 at June 2, 2007 08:21 AM
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Comments
The analogy doesn't work. Universities are not about taste; they're about knowledge and skills. The curriculum is not a greatest hits of knowledge.
But let's follow through on Carey's analogy, to see where it fails. Take the Stones. If you want to *know* anything about the Stones's music, you need a much larger, less "selective" music store, one that features 78s, LPs, and CDs of people like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Bessie Smith, Bukka White, Howlin' Wolf, the Harry Smith anthology -- and those are just the best of the influences.
Real knowledge means knowing a lot of stuff that hasn't survived the Harold-Bloom-style War of Great Art. If you really want to understand *The Scarlet Letter*, you need to read a lot of once-popular American texts, from captivity narratives to anti-Puritan gothic novels. If you want to understand *Waverley*, you need to read a ton of tracts about the Anglo-Scottish Union, a ton of "national tales," travel narratives, and so on.
Posted by: Linval Thompson at June 2, 2007 04:42 PM
So basically, Linval, your purpose is to disagree with anything and everything posted on Acta and on Critical Mass.
Posted by: Winston Smith at June 2, 2007 05:52 PM
Yeah, Winston. It's called "intellectual diversity." I think ACTA has put out a press release or three about it.
Posted by: Linval Thompson at June 2, 2007 07:21 PM
I call it trolling.
You're just here to disagree with people and get a rise out of them.
You're not interested in actual discussion, just telling people that they're wrong and you're right.
Posted by: Winston Smith at June 2, 2007 09:12 PM
Well, Winston, what would you like to discuss? Do you think that my comment about Carey's analogy is wrong? If so, say so. Make an argument.
I try to make arguments, insofar as I have time and space in a comments box. And I don't think I'm merely contrarian. I support some core requirements in each discipline. But I resent the condescension visited upon certain areas of study because they aren't perceived as part of the core. Take, for example, the ACTA blogger's smirking comment about courses on hip-hop. First of all, I'd be interested in seeing exactly how many universities offer such a course on a regular basis, or as anything other than either a freshman writing course topic or an upper-level research course. Second, for the English major going into a field like communications or journalism or publishing, a scholarly knowledge of current popular culture is essential. Third, college courses must teach certain skills as well as certain bodies of knowledge. So a course on research methods related to popular cultural study might teach something that other English courses cannot. Fourth, I think the job market must ultimately be the test of the education. If the candidate can do the job well, we can only assume s/he was educated properly for it. Fifth, I continue to think that much of the need for core requirements could be met if K-12 curricula were more intellectually rigorous.
It's easy to write off those who disagree with you as trolls. Kill off the trolls and websites such as this could be as ideologically uniform as they complain universities are.
Posted by: Linval Thompson at June 3, 2007 12:39 AM
How many hip-hop course? A lot:
Posted by: Jim at June 4, 2007 07:42 AM
Jim, note how many of those are dance courses. Hip-hop dance is essential for any dancer hoping to work today. Also, such a search gives us no idea how many hip-hop courses run in any given year, only how many have on-line information that remains on-line. (That is, some of those syllabi and descriptions are for old courses.)
Posted by: Linval Thompson at June 4, 2007 09:47 AM
OK. Refining the search criteria a bit to include "writing" and the recent academic year ("2006" or "2007"):
hip-hop course description writing (2007 OR 2006) site:.edu
If half of these are bogus for some reason, that still leaves 19,000 hits.
Posted by: Jim at June 4, 2007 04:19 PM
Jim, just because a course has the words "hip hop" in the syllabus doesn't make that course a "hip hop" class. On the first page of the search, there's a course on contemporary Senegalese culture -- and of course, hip-hop makes sense on that syllabus.
But you're right, there are plenty of freshman writing courses on hip-hop. That's why I wrote, above: " . . . I'd be interested in seeing exactly how many universities offer such a course on a regular basis, or as anything other than either a freshman writing course topic or an upper-level research course."
Freshman writing courses are the most commodity-like in the curriculum. Adjuncts and graduate students must compete for enrollment or risk a cancelled class (and no money). So it makes sense for the instructors of a freshman writing class to "sell" it to the largely 18-year-old students.
Do you see something wrong with a writing class with popular music as the topic?
Posted by: Linval Thompson at June 4, 2007 07:35 PM
Have to agree in part with "Linval Thompson" AKA "Luther Bissett" (BTW, if leftist sway-dough intellectual smarm is to your taste, try LT?s or LB?s usual venue, The Valve) AKA "Whatever, Dude!" in that he serves as gadfly and spur to those of us countering his indefencible rubbish about the necessity of "teaching" pop "culture" (surely an oxymoron) to students who are already "experts" (and awash) in such forms of cultural sewage. As the admirable ACTA article and extended Carey analogy show, formation of taste and discrimination (in Jane Austen?s sense) is a crucial part of humanities instruction, so that while students (for a bit of casual fun) can dabble in the popular on their own time and where such fads and fashions may have some ephemeral vibrancy, they don?t have to suffer through "lectures" on pop "culture" by sway-dough intellectual (and usually super-annuated) hippies, time-wasting poseurs and leftist shills at university. Through real cultivation of taste and intellect let the more discriminating and cultured students eventually prefer what is profound and enduring to what is superficial and ephemeral, for, as the sublime philosopher Joseph de Maistre has it, "Le nouveau est, par definition, le perissable partie des choses".
Posted by: Jacques Albert at June 23, 2007 05:54 AM