Liberal Arts Education
Should College Students be required to take Courses Outside of Their Major Field of Study?
An education that lacks of a world view may be more harmful than meets the eye. One could reasonably argue that the question of whether diversified educational background has value is highly dependent on what you value. There are a multitude of monetary reasons for an incoming freshman to concentrate on a specific field of education and not pursue courses outside of their area of emphasis. For one college is expensive, tuition averages over $13,000 a year at public universities and indecisiveness as well as unnecessary credits can drain a college savings account (Ronin, 2005). Furthermore in the modern American world of Enron and Lehmann Brothers, if you're not cheating you're not really trying, it's not cheating if you don't get caught, and I didn't do it, you didn't see me, and you can't prove it anyway, values are worthless, or at least they cost too much if you want to retire at thirty-five. These values are a result of a deficient understanding the qualities of citizenship.
Discussion
The conservative perennial presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan (2011) points out that of 31,000 students given the National Assessment of Education Progress, the so called "Nation's Report Card," most fourth-graders could not identify a picture of Abraham Lincoln or tell why he was important. A majority of eighth-graders could not name a reason the American forces had an advantage during the Revolutionary War, and most twelfth-graders did not know why America entered World War II or that China was North Korea's ally in the Korean War. Dishearteningly, only 20% of fourth-graders 17% of the eighth-graders and 12% of the twelfth-graders attained a "proficient" score on the test.
Buchanan (2011) believes that recent developments in K-12 curriculum have led to raising young people who are "historically...
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