'Gen Ed Changed My Life'
Some thoughts inspired by my favorite English teacher
The eponymous host of Writing with Andrew dishes up sound advice and warm-hearted encouragement, gently seasoned with humanity, humility, and humor, to people who wish to improve their writing. Thus, as I belong to the latter category, I spend a lot of time watching (or, once I convert them to audio programs, listening) to the videos made by this ascended academic. Indeed, I think so well of Andrew’s work that the link to his channel sits atop of the little ladder of bookmarks I use to train the YouTube algorithm to serve Extra Mural purposes.
Last week, Andrew posted, under a thumbnail that proclaimed ‘gen ed changed my life’, a video in which he told tales of the twists and turns of his undergraduate career. To be more precise, in the course of defending the curious customs of North American colleges, my favorite English teacher explained how the general education requirements imposed on his younger self allowed him to recover from a mistake he made in his freshman year.
Young Andrew, it seems, wanted to study the subject that, many years later, would provide his channel with its raison d’être, ‘language, and how it worked’. To that end, he declared his intention to major in ‘English’ and enrolled in classes where, to his dismay, ‘all that his professors and classmates wanted to talk about was the politics, psychology, and history that showed up in literature’. In other words, Andrew had discovered, to his great chagrin, that college courses enjoy an exemption from the laws that mandate truth in advertising.
This story brought to mind my own experience with schoolish mislabeling, a program in economics that, rather than exploring the way economies actually worked, turned out to be a training course in the dark and deceptive arts made popular by John Maynard ‘in the long run we are all dead’ Keynes. To be fair, the grift at the root of my misadventure had been perpetrated long before I had been born, to the point where some honest folk had begun to confuse the disciples of the venomous Lord Keynes with proper practitioners of the dismal science. Nonetheless, a prominently-placed label that warned of multiple meanings of the word ‘economics’ would have saved me a great deal of toil, trouble, and treasure.
Andrew confesses, and I will therefore follow suit, that peculiar experience played a big role in maleficent choices we made in the early days of our respective freshmen years. In his case, the mistake owed much to high school English classes that, marvelous to say, dealt with ‘language, and how it worked’. In my own experience, the fault lay with my habit of reading books, mostly bought at yard sales for a nickel apiece, that had been penned, in the days of straw hats and starched collars, by champions of sound money and free markets. In other words, the fortunate felicity we had each experienced in early adolescence set the stage for maleficent misunderstanding at a later stage of life.
Had the college freshmen that Andrew and I once were been able to trade places, I would, in all likelihood, have avoided the trap that deprived him of a year of life and learning. Like him, I loved the mechanics of language, the finer points of grammar, the art of composition, and, most of all, poetry. However, as the painfully prosaic philistines who purported to teach me my mother tongue during my last two years of high school had both been thoroughly sheep-dipped in The New York Review of Books, I had already learned the art of locating, and thus avoiding, the amusische adherents of the cult of lit lit.
With these anecdotes in mind, I can safely say that many matriculants at North American colleges commit to courses of study well before they have any sense of the contents of the curricula in question. As a result, while some end up pressing (often at great cost) the reset button, others resign themselves to four (or more) years of mindless misery.
In keeping with the thumbnail attached to his video, Andrew credits his recovery from the great error of his freshman year to ‘gen ed’ requirement of his alma mater. In particular, the rule that he study disciplines beyond the boundaries of his major led him to a class that would, in all likelihood, have otherwise overlooked. While offered by the department of linguistics, this exploration of the ‘history of rhetoric’ provided the sort of experience he had hoped to find in his courses in English.
I was, of course, delighted to learn that my favorite English teacher had succeeded in his quest. At the same time, requiring that students hazard thousands of dollars in order to jump into the deep ends of a dozen or so poorly marked pools, each filled with a liquid of an unfamiliar (and possibly toxic) type, strikes me as an excessively stochastic solution to the problem of opaque academic advertisement.
One can imagine a situation in which, instead of a catalog filled with one paragraph course descriptions, a college offered students a web site that allowed them, not merely to download syllabi, readings, and reviews, but watch videos of actual class meetings. Better yet, we can get a good sense of what such a catalog might look like by visiting the web pages of the classes offered for the past fifteen years by Open Yale Courses. (This link will take you to my favorite lecture series in this collection.)
Fans of direct-to-video lectures also enjoy the freedom to preview the classes, so to speak, that they might want to take. Thus, the self-directed learner who wishes to brush up on his knowledge of New Amsterdam, can sample both the relevant episodes of The Other States of America and the finished portions of the (yet to be completed) series on the same subject produced by Defragged History. Thus, if he finds the former too elementary, he can do a deep double Dutch dive into the latter. Likewise, if he finds the pronunciation of Netherlandish names in the latter a little too authentic for his tastes, the autodidact can work his way through the all-American series before venturing into the world of Petrus Stuyvesant and Adrien van der Donck.
