University is not a fun time for many students. The Varsity recently published a survey that found students complaining about large class sizes, little interaction with professors, and a virtually non-existent school community. Add that to the fact that university is enormously stressful and you have a toxic combination that too often can lead to escapism through alcohol or drug abuse, and high rates of depression. University is meant to be a time of exploration for young adults who finally have the freedom to craft their own intellectual experience. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A desire to build “well-rounded citizens” has caused the undermining of our education system and all the problems university students suffer from.
Almost every student at U of T has complained about required courses — usually the breadth requirements that demand humanities students take science courses and vice versa — but few question the scope of the damage caused by eliminating freedom of choice. In this regard, the problem does not lie primarily with breadth requirements for a degree but with the required courses within any given field of study. There are requirements that demand history students study periods from every continent on the globe or that philosophy students question the nature of reality instead of focusing on ethics, for example.
Of course, we are given the illusion of choice — to get our major we must choose one course from selection A, three from selection B, and two from selection C. As anyone who has used ROSI knows, it can be practically impossible to create any semblance of specialization when many of your courses that share subject matter do not fit in the same timetable. What many students end up with is a hodgepodge of virtually unrelated courses, many of which they would prefer not to be in.
When you take 30,000+ students and put them in classes they don’t want to be in, you end up with underperforming students, jaded professors and TAs, and a reduced standard for reading material and course work. This means the few students who do get into the courses they want are confronted with a subject they love being taught in a way they can’t stand.
University is meant to break from the traditions of high school. You are told that you will have more free agency than you did in the structured world of secondary education, but required courses make this less and less the case. If you are a history student with a passion for Imperial China, what can you gain from having to study what the Germans were doing during the Industrial Revolution? Rather than building an integrated area of specialty from which you can draw upon deep knowledge of a specific subject, you get a long list of areas of which your understanding is incredibly shallow.
It’s a commonly understood educational principle that people will not learn unless they are interested. This is the reason that high schools in Ontario practise the enriched program that ensures overachievers do not become bored with the material they are being taught and thus underperform. It is the same in university. If you do not want to be in class, you will learn almost nothing from class.
What if instead we had a system that actually treated students like individuals and gave them greater choice within education? What if you could specialize in the specific area that interested you no matter how broad or narrow that might be? It may seem like a novel concept but it is in practice in schools like Brown that have no course requirements, and New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
The Gallatin School allows undergrads to come up with an outline of what they would like to achieve by the end of their studies. The staff and faculty then help them flesh it out using courses from any and all areas of study to achieve a specialized and individualized program based on the desires of each student. Because students are given the freedom to choose, they have a stake in creating their own education and a greater interest in their courses.
Professors know that excited students want to be in class and as a result will want to offer intriguing and challenging courses and introduce students to new reading material instead of tired old textbooks. Excitement makes learning easier and reduces stress and the negative results thereof. And students in self-selected areas of study are surrounded by like-minded individuals, making community and extra-curricular life more enjoyable in the long run. If U of T desires to be one of the top learning institutions in the world, then it should not squander the ability of its students; instead it should undertake a similar course of action and give the student body the freedom of choice it deserves.
