A New Hope for Restoring American Education

The widespread demonstrations on college campuses in support of Hamas since the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel have crystalized for many Americans the deep rot at the center of the U.S. education system. Perhaps the most promising proposal in decades for addressing these problems is the General Education Act (GEA) recently released by the National Association of Scholars, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

The GEA calls for establishing a new, independent School of General Education at every state’s flagship public university. It would authorize instituting a core curriculum of thirteen courses totaling 42 semester hours (roughly 40 percent of the standard course load at most American universities) covering Western history and humanities, world civilizations, and U.S. history, government, and literature.

The proposal is based on the eminently sound goal of restoring “a common civic education to the center of American public university education,” one “that includes examination of fundamental moral and philosophical questions via a study of the history and the greatest books of Western civilization and the world.”

The GEA is a remedy to the virtual disappearance of a solid liberal arts curriculum that supplies students with a grounding in the basic principles of classical and modern philosophy, a broad knowledge of Western history and American constitutionalism, and an appreciation of the learning that can be gleaned from great literature ranging from Greek tragedy and comedy through Shakespeare and up to classic American fiction.

It has become obvious that the programs of general education which were once standard requirements have gradually been replaced by “distribution requirements,” with students merely choosing from a cafeteria menu of specialized, unrelated courses in different fields, often accompanied by mandated DEI instruction that forecloses any useful intellectual exchange.

The meaninglessness of such programs, barring careful course selection (which few students undertake) at a solid liberal arts institution is signified by the title of a recent op-ed by a college instructor in the New York Times: “I Teach the Humanities. I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is.” If faculty don’t know why they are teaching humanities courses (aside from using them for ideological indoctrination), how can anyone expect students to find value in them?

The proposed curriculum in the GEA still leaves room for students to major in a particular discipline, and the number of required courses would be reduced to ten for science/pre-med majors, given the extra number of specialized courses they may need to take. But the GEA’s drafters point out that the choice of whether students at public institutions should be required to take courses in “critical theory” (e.g., so-called Critical Race Theory or critical legal studies, both anti-Western, anti-constitutional doctrines) rather than in Western Civilization is one that properly belongs to the people’s elected representatives, rather than to academic specialists and bureaucrats.

As the GEA drafters emphasize, “traditional liberal education belongs to no single ideology or political party.” Nor does their proposed curricular outline exhibit any such ideological bias.

Aside from one-semester courses (at various levels and specializations) in mathematics and laboratory sciences, the program begins with a required course in Rhetoric and English Composition (a replacement for open-ended freshman English courses) that includes “grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and substantial readings from works devoted to rhetoric and composition” by such figures as Aristotle, Cicero, and eighteenth-century Scottish rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair.

That course alone, I believe, based on my own professional experience, would equip students not only to “produce correct and lucid academic writing,” but to better participate in public debate in their roles as adult citizens.

Other required courses in the GEA include a two-semester sequence in Western history from 3000 BC to 2000 AD and single courses on U.S. history from 1607 to 1877, U.S. government, American literature extending to 1914, and introductory economics.

The first semester of Western history would highlight such important themes as classical Greece, the Roman Republic and empire, the rise of Christianity, and 12th-13th century English legal and constitutional history, “including Magna Carta, common law, and Parliament.”

The second-semester curriculum, beginning in 1450, would cover the Renaissance and Reformation, the development of British parliamentary history, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the rise and fall of Soviet communism and Nazi Germany.

The U.S. Government course, exploring such founding principles as “natural rights, liberty, equality, representative democracy, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and constitutional self-government” and their historical development, properly emphasizes the study of original source materials.

Besides the above, the GEA curriculum includes a two-semester sequence on “Western Humanities,” exploring “works of first-rank literary quality and enduring literary and philosophical influence” in the first semester, such as those by Plato, Augustine, Homer, and Dante, along with the Bible. This is followed by a humanities course running from 1450 to 1950 and including such great authors as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Donne, along with “Catholic and Protestant religious literature,” but with “approximately equal coverage” of the five centuries it encompasses.

Additionally required is a course on World Civilizations, “covering the distinctive history, culture, literature, and social structure of at least four nations or cultural areas to be selected from among China, India, the Islamic Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Russia, Japan, and Southeast Asia.”

Finally, students are required to choose one of three courses respectively devoted to “Founding Ideas of Western Liberty” (including such writers as Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville), “Founding Traditions of Western Art” (including music and architecture), and “Founding Ideas of Western Economics.” The study of a foreign language is encouraged though not required.

Equally significant and running against current trends in higher education is the proposal’s ban on academic credit for so-called “service learning” and political lobbying.

Having spent 63 years in the “ivory tower” of American academia, I am convinced that many students (and their parents) will find this curriculum appealing, and a vast improvement over that of typical college offerings. So will other public-spirited citizens. But is the proposal realistic?

The broad goal of the proposal’s authors is that, following adoption by flagship public universities, other schools would follow suit, along with implementing dual-credit professional development programs that will assist high school teachers in offering courses covering some of the proposal’s required course materials. The GEA further provides for instruction for graduate students, by equipping them to teach in similar programs at other colleges, public and private.

Yet the authors of the plan realistically acknowledge that the expansion of the proposed School of General Education will require faculty reductions in other university divisions, “through program discontinuance or substantial curtailment,” subject to the sole discretion of the university’s governing board. Faculty for the School of General Education would be permitted to hold joint appointments with other divisions of the university. But, faculty from other divisions will not be allowed a role in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.

The proposal leaves it up to policymakers to decide how a state’s governing board will be selected, and it is designed to be instituted gradually, over a three-year period.

It is undeniable that, as the proposal’s introduction observes, “in the last generation, the American public has justly lost confidence in the higher education establishment’s judgment about general education,” refusing “to defer to faculty and education administrators who advance their personal politics under the guise of academic expertise.”

Several legislatures, as the authors write, have already “begun to exercise their legitimate authority over the content of general education,” noting “the failure of public universities to nurture a robust marketplace of ideas” in favor of so-called cancel culture, or worse, in the form of the Hamas demonstrators harassing and threatening Jewish and other pro-Israel students, along with the growing conflict between specialized faculty research interests and students’ needs.

Nonetheless, you don’t need to be a habitué of academia to recognize that once a legislature attempts to institute anything like the GEA, all hell will break loose. Opposition will come not only from faculty anxious about their job security and professional administrators zealously and jealously committed to retaining their authority, but also from political partisans who have bought into the notion that the very function of a college education is to recruit activists for their favored causes. Such a view has long infected the realm of humanities research as well, as a cursory glance at the Publications of the Modern Language Association (the most prestigious journal in the field) over the past half-century will readily disclose.

Even worse will be the political opposition generated by faculty unions. The response from the University of Pennsylvania’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors to the forced resignation of UPenn president Elizabeth Magill over her mushy response to campus antisemitism is a preview of what this might look like.

Despite the justified outrage over Magill’s congressional testimony stating that the question of whether calls for genocide against Jews violated the school’s code of conduct “depended on the context,” the AAUP released a statement lamenting that “unelected trustees with no academic experience are evidently attempting a hostile takeover of the core academic functions of the University of Pennsylvania — functions related to curriculum, research and the hiring and evaluation of faculty.”

In other words (as losing 2021 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe told parents protesting ideological indoctrination in public schools) trustees, parents, and other taxpayers have no business interfering with decisions arrived at by incumbent academic “professionals.”

But the current situation of America’s system of higher education system, at least outside the STEM fields, is critical, and increasingly characterized by outright intellectual corruption. At one college that I know well, even courses on introductory Greek include five-minute lectures on Critical Race Theory.

Like the aforementioned Times contributor, many faculty in the humanities and social sciences lack any plausible justification for their curricula. So why should taxpayers continue to support them?

Only the renewal of the pursuit of truth, grounded in the study of what the nineteenth-century British critic Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said,” can set us free from the dominion of intellectual and civic decay. The GEA proposal is a positive first step in that direction.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.