Scientific literacy course for non-scientists

[marshwiggle]

There might be up to about half a dozen schools people attend *because* of the core. For everyone else, even if they are "better" schools, people go there for other things and endure gen ed or the core. Sure, there are significant numbers of late deciders who figure out a major based on a core class they took, but still, that's not most.

A question since this wasn't the system I went through:

Is there any of the "core" that could have been covered in high school, and if not, why not?

(I think the basic idea outside the US is basically that the "core", that everyone should have, is basically what high school is for, since high school is mandatory.)

[Parasaurolophus]

There might be up to about half a dozen schools people attend *because* of the core. For everyone else, even if they are "better" schools, people go there for other things and endure gen ed or the core. Sure, there are significant numbers of late deciders who figure out a major based on a core class they took, but still, that's not most.

A question since this wasn't the system I went through:

Is there any of the "core" that could have been covered in high school, and if not, why not?

(I think the basic idea outside the US is basically that the "core", that everyone should have, is basically what high school is for, since high school is mandatory.)

I did my undergrad at a Canadian school with core distribution requirements. They were normal first-year undergrad courses, covering material we mostly hadn't seen--or had access to--in high school. (And I went to a very fancy high school--still in Canada--where we had access to more than what's usually in the public system.)

Edit: I should add that the difference with CEGEP was much smaller, and my CEGEP courses actually counted for a lot of credit among those distribution requirements.

[Wahoo Redux]

There might be up to about half a dozen schools people attend *because* of the core. For everyone else, even if they are "better" schools, people go there for other things and endure gen ed or the core. Sure, there are significant numbers of late deciders who figure out a major based on a core class they took, but still, that's not most.

A question since this wasn't the system I went through:

Is there any of the "core" that could have been covered in high school, and if not, why not?

(I think the basic idea outside the US is basically that the "core", that everyone should have, is basically what high school is for, since high school is mandatory.)

You're a guy who keeps banging on the same nut over and over, my friend. 

[marshwiggle]

Edit: I should add that the difference with CEGEP was much smaller, and my CEGEP courses actually counted for a lot of credit among those distribution requirements.

I left the province to avoid CEGEP because it meant I could finish in 4 years instead of 5. CEGEP had the reputation for a lot of partying and drinking, more than anything else.

[Parasaurolophus]

Edit: I should add that the difference with CEGEP was much smaller, and my CEGEP courses actually counted for a lot of credit among those distribution requirements.

I left the province to avoid CEGEP because it meant I could finish in 4 years instead of 5. CEGEP had the reputation for a lot of partying and drinking, more than anything else.

I'm pretty sure the partying and drinking got credited when I transferred out to NB for my undergrad.

[Ruralguy]

As far as Kant goes, he wasn't the only one who was difficult, but he was the most difficult. I think the idea was to show the links in the chain of philosophical thinking from 400 B..C. to the present (well, the present being over 35 years ago), especially political philosophy since we then progressed to  Hegel and Marx.
I'd be lying if I said I understood much of it, especially Kant and Hegel. Anyway, it didn't turn me off to the core or college, or anything like that. It just left me stymied.

I should mention that the core became controversial over time for focusing on the work of "dead white males." More of the core book choices now have options with a few of the options being written by women and minorities (I think this was more in the Literature course than the civ course, but I think even the civ course had some options). 

[marshwiggle]

Edit: I should add that the difference with CEGEP was much smaller, and my CEGEP courses actually counted for a lot of credit among those distribution requirements.

I left the province to avoid CEGEP because it meant I could finish in 4 years instead of 5. CEGEP had the reputation for a lot of partying and drinking, more than anything else.

I'm pretty sure the partying and drinking got credited when I transferred out to NB for my undergrad.

Two of my friends also went to NB for the same reason I did. I heard that a significant portion of the student body was from Quebec, doing the same thing. In that case, CEGEP was basically driving a lot of good students out of the province to save a year.

[Parasaurolophus]

As far as Kant goes, he wasn't the only one who was difficult, but he was the most difficult. I think the idea was to show the links in the chain of philosophical thinking from 400 B..C. to the present (well, the present being over 35 years ago), especially political philosophy since we then progressed to  Hegel and Marx.
I'd be lying if I said I understood much of it, especially Kant and Hegel. Anyway, it didn't turn me off to the core or college, or anything like that. It just left me stymied.

Sounds increasingly irresponsible to me!

[Ruralguy]

That's an interesting take on my experience. Can you elaborate?

I will go to my alma mater's website to see if they still teach the course that way, but I believe mostly yes they do, with some options. 

[FishProf]

At FishProf U, GenEd science course are supposed to teach about science (the stuff marshwiggle framed out) in the process of teaching some content.  How well that works is a matter of debate, when anyone cares at all.

[ergative]

We had  a year sequence of western civ, a year of  literature, and  one semester each of music/art. Everyone had to take the same courses in this core, though not in any preferred sequence. There were other distributions too, but science I was a stem major from the start, I never paid much attention to that part of the core, though in more recent years this school added a core science class for everybody. Though I can't say I absolutely loved all of these classes, I genuinely enjoyed learning material from primary texts...until Kant....then, I gave up. Most of my current students do not have this attitude.

There's no excuse for Kant in a first-year course--or any course without the proper time and context. I'm sorry it happened.

Given that this whole thread is about how to present something esoteric in a way that is accessiblee to non-specialists---quite possibly in their first year---what's wrong with the idea that Kant can also be treated in this way? Is Kant truly that impenetrable?

(Full disclosure: I was also assigned some Kant in my core classes in college, and I seem to recall not doing the reading, even though usually I was quite good about that. I am absolutely open to the idea that he was truly that impenetrable.)

[Wahoo Redux]

We had  a year sequence of western civ, a year of  literature, and  one semester each of music/art. Everyone had to take the same courses in this core, though not in any preferred sequence. There were other distributions too, but science I was a stem major from the start, I never paid much attention to that part of the core, though in more recent years this school added a core science class for everybody. Though I can't say I absolutely loved all of these classes, I genuinely enjoyed learning material from primary texts...until Kant....then, I gave up. Most of my current students do not have this attitude.

There's no excuse for Kant in a first-year course--or any course without the proper time and context. I'm sorry it happened.

Given that this whole thread is about how to present something esoteric in a way that is accessiblee to non-specialists---quite possibly in their first year---what's wrong with the idea that Kant can also be treated in this way? Is Kant truly that impenetrable?

(Full disclosure: I was also assigned some Kant in my core classes in college, and I seem to recall not doing the reading, even though usually I was quite good about that. I am absolutely open to the idea that he was truly that impenetrable.)

Kant is accessible with a bit of practice.  A good prof should be able to explain him. He throws people because his writing is so unlike almost anything else one comes across unless one reads a lot of philosophy.

And honestly, Hegel, Zizek, Levinas, or Derrida make Kant seem like algebra, hard for non-mathematicians but nothing once you get the swing.

The college core is meant to challenge us. Kant, for instance (to allude to an earlier question), has no place in a high school classroom.  Kant is for adults.

[Ruralguy]

Looks like my alma mater has swapped out Hegel and Freud for Ghandi and Arendt. Kant is still there.

[Caracal]

[
And honestly, Hegel, Zizek, Levinas, or Derrida make Kant seem like algebra, hard for non-mathematicians but nothing once you get the swing.

Very much not a mathematician but algebra always made intuitive sense to me. Sometimes the details got a little complicated, but the concepts generally made sense to me. Pre-Calc was where I hit my limits and stopped being able to wrap my head around it.

[Parasaurolophus]

That's an interesting take on my experience. Can you elaborate?

Given that this whole thread is about how to present something esoteric in a way that is accessiblee to non-specialists---quite possibly in their first year---what's wrong with the idea that Kant can also be treated in this way? Is Kant truly that impenetrable?

(Full disclosure: I was also assigned some Kant in my core classes in college, and I seem to recall not doing the reading, even though usually I was quite good about that. I am absolutely open to the idea that he was truly that impenetrable.)

Other opinions are available, of course. And while I'm a philosopher, I'm not a historian of philosophy (I do contemporary analytic stuff), although I do very occasionally publish on 19th-century German philosophy (I have a chapter due in August, actually).

Kant and Hegel are among the hardest academic texts out there. They're hard in and of themselves (little Kant joke there), and their difficulty is compounded by the translations, and the quirks of 18th- and 19th-century academic German. To get much of anything from them, you need a firm foundation in modern philosophy, and you really need to get stuck in. When we teach them in philosophy, it's usually at the third- or fourth-year level. This isn't true for every historical figure in philosophy, by the way. But I think it's true of those two.

IMO you really can't just read a few pages here and there and move on to the next dead guy (partial exception: you can sort of get away with it with Kant's ethics, but even then you'd be better served teaching it to first-years via secondary sources like the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy). That's not to say you have to read everything, but you really do have to be careful with those two in particular. It's like reading a little topology in your first year, or trying your hand at Gödel's incompleteness theorems without any background in set theory, or without knowing anything about proof by contradiction or diagonalization. You could do it, I guess (for some value of "do it"), but nobody's going to get much out of it, and what they do get is likely to be wrong anyway. (The bit of Hegel most people get this way is the "master-slave "dialectic," and what they learn about it is wrong. Leaving aside that I actually think Hegel is a waste of everyone's time and that even he didn't know what he was saying!)

More broadly, although I think that the history of philosophy is important and interesting, I think that it's a poor use of a gen ed credit. For students who aren't going to take it ever again, it paints a very misleading picture of what philosophy is and does--it makes it indistinguishable from the history of ideas, and demonstrates marginal present-day relevance (especially in comparison to the other, contemporary, stuff you could teach instead)--and it doesn't really do much to transmit basic philosophical skills, either. A survey of ethics, critical thinking, epistemology, or aesthetics would be a much better use of that time, IMO, especially if you want to read primary texts. Plus, that way, they'll read more than just dead white guys.

But I accept that's just me! I have strong views on the subject, and I don't know how widely shared they are.