General Education
What do we know that can be validated in our own experiences and in the experiences of these scholars that addresses the general education curriculum including Philip Phenix, Clifford Lord, John Dewey, Charles Lahey, Arthur Foshay and others who have viewed the disciplines as ways of creating and communicating personal meaning found within the dimensions of general education.
General education:
General education is expected to produce a well-rounded individual accomplished through mandated subjects selected by those in authority for instruction throughout the years from early childhood through post graduate study. Included among the subjects are history, geography and occasionally cultural anthropology known in lower grades as social studies. Students are instructed in natural sciences and mathematics along with English grammar, spelling, and literature. Some even study foreign languages.
In many conventional schools there is now a requirement to offer subjects related to health including instruction in sex education and mental health.
Pre-defined topics are selected from the conclusions that subject matter specialists have written about and found acceptable among the publics, taught separately from one another. Recall is thought to require repetition since remembering the information is believed to need reinforcement to ensure its retention.
Testimony suggests that recall despite reinforcement is short lived. A very small percentage of the topics in the general education curriculum can be recalled after the tests have been graded and the students have moved on within the prescribed curriculum.
A hundred years ago Alfred North Whitehead said in his statement concerning the aims of education the focus should be on the development of an eye for the whole chessboard (the whole general education experience), and for the bearing of one set of ideas on another. He warned of offering inert ideas that are simply taken into the mind and never put into fresh combinations. Inert ideas are not only useless he said, but they are also harmful.
Not considering Whitehead’s warning, the general education programs in conventional schools are basically instruction in inert ideas that are offered as unrelated subjects with little or no consideration for the bearing of one set of ideas (courses) on another. At increasing costs, this pattern is perpetuated year after year with continuing damage to the levels attained regarding competency and mental health.
After the Russians sent Sputnik into space ahead of this country in 1957, there emerged a panic focused on the perceived failures of schools and their general education curricula. Improvement in the teaching of math and science then became the primary goal of a flurry of activities involving specialists in these two subjects drawn from college and university faculties. The humanities were given short shrift.
We apparently didn’t learn much since we have now in 2020’s initiated an approach inherent in the slogan STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics means success. The humanities once again are given a lesser status.
After the Sputnik episode in response to the need for the humanities, Professor Philip Phenix of Teachers College Columbia University launched a study aimed at defining all the components of general education that existed at that time.
Members enrolled in a doctoral seminar entitled “Ways of Knowing” this author and fellow graduate students were engaged in interviewing those individuals who were recognized scholars in their chosen general education discipline. We asked these scholars to describe their perceptions of what they considered their discipline to entail, including its modes of inquiry, key concepts, organizing principles and relationships to other disciplines.
This information provided Professor Phenix with data required to formulate a comprehensive model for general education that placed the disciplines in categories labeled realms of meaning. Findings were found to suggest six different, but interrelated realms based on the structural similarities among the disciplines within each realm.
All the sciences including social sciences were assigned to the realm of empirics.
All languages including mathematics were assigned to the realm of symbolics.
All the arts were assigned to the realm of aesthetics.
The school subjects, history, geography, and cultural anthropology were assigned to the realm of synoptics. Philosophy and religion were also included in this realm.
The realm of ethics included matters of morality and ethical decision making.
Self-knowledge and self-understanding were included in the realm of synnoetics.
The disciplines in each realm were viewed as ways of creating and communicating knowledge with structural similarities that facilitate transfer from one to another within each realm.
The social sciences were taken out of humanities and placed within the science realm. Mathematics was recognized as a language like all languages having a vocabulary, syntax, and a dynamic structure. Geography, history, and cultural anthropology were recognized as having a synoptic role that draws upon and integrates the findings of disciplines from other realms.
Ethics and morality are given an official seat at the table of general education.
Self-knowledge and self-understanding are recognized as having a central role in acquiring maximized meaning from the studies of general education involving the study of life in all its manifestations.
Phenic’s schematic regarding realms of meaning brings order to the hodgepodge of subjects that are now offered in the general education programs of conventional schools. This schematic is consistent with accomplishing the missions of education as defined by Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, to wit: To enable human nature itself to change, to enable each generation to transmit to the next whatever wisdom it has gained about living, and to free the enormous untapped creative potential which lies latent in varying degrees in the preconscious processes of everyone.
If students were to engage the disciplines utilizing their methods and materials adapted to developmental differences consistent with known principles not only regarding appropriate developmental experiences but also consistent with known matters in the development of groups as teams of learners, and with an understanding of learning as a cumulative process that must be completed to be effective and lasting. If the above three missions would be achieved that would result in personally competent and productive achievements in mental health and effective citizenship.
A specific example of this process involved this author's facilitating a group of seventh graders in a typical classroom with a diversity of student interests and abilities, utilizing the methods and materials of history and geography focused on an in-depth study of their local area. Having assembled primary information drawn from original sources, students set about creating a vision of life as it evolved in their communities from inception throughout the early years of development.
This study included physical geography which involves an in-depth study of what existed in their local territory including the bedrocks, soils, relief features, vegetation, fauna, climate, weather, and location. Constructing an iconic model that looks like what is being represented, that shows the relationships between the parts of the system to which they belong and provides a vision of the setting within which occurred the social cultural factors of inhabitants, economic processes and formation of political structures and processes. Putting together these variables into a system was the outcome.
Contrast this experience with sitting through presentations of isolated bits of someone else’s information culminated with a test for recall.
These seventh-grade level students facilitated by this author created an integrated view of what life had to offer in the most familiar place in their experience, their community. That laid the groundwork for understanding life as it occurs in other areas of the country, the world, and beyond.
Furthermore, having created the structures of meaning they were able to retain and build upon that experience in the years to come.
That experience also defines the earlier experiences that would lead to maximized inquiry within the studies at the 7th grade and beyond in high school and college.
General education:
General education is expected to produce a well-rounded individual accomplished through mandated subjects selected by those in authority for instruction throughout the years from early childhood through post graduate study. Included among the subjects are history, geography and occasionally cultural anthropology known in lower grades as social studies. Students are instructed in natural sciences and mathematics along with English grammar, spelling, and literature. Some even study foreign languages.
In many conventional schools there is now a requirement to offer subjects related to health including instruction in sex education and mental health.
Pre-defined topics are selected from the conclusions that subject matter specialists have written about and found acceptable among the publics, taught separately from one another. Recall is thought to require repetition since remembering the information is believed to need reinforcement to ensure its retention.
Testimony suggests that recall despite reinforcement is short lived. A very small percentage of the topics in the general education curriculum can be recalled after the tests have been graded and the students have moved on within the prescribed curriculum.
A hundred years ago Alfred North Whitehead said in his statement concerning the aims of education the focus should be on the development of an eye for the whole chessboard (the whole general education experience), and for the bearing of one set of ideas on another. He warned of offering inert ideas that are simply taken into the mind and never put into fresh combinations. Inert ideas are not only useless he said, but they are also harmful.
Not considering Whitehead’s warning, the general education programs in conventional schools are basically instruction in inert ideas that are offered as unrelated subjects with little or no consideration for the bearing of one set of ideas (courses) on another. At increasing costs, this pattern is perpetuated year after year with continuing damage to the levels attained regarding competency and mental health.
After the Russians sent Sputnik into space ahead of this country in 1957, there emerged a panic focused on the perceived failures of schools and their general education curricula. Improvement in the teaching of math and science then became the primary goal of a flurry of activities involving specialists in these two subjects drawn from college and university faculties. The humanities were given short shrift.
We apparently didn’t learn much since we have now in 2020’s initiated an approach inherent in the slogan STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics means success. The humanities once again are given a lesser status.
After the Sputnik episode in response to the need for the humanities, Professor Philip Phenix of Teachers College Columbia University launched a study aimed at defining all the components of general education that existed at that time.
Members enrolled in a doctoral seminar entitled “Ways of Knowing” this author and fellow graduate students were engaged in interviewing those individuals who were recognized scholars in their chosen general education discipline. We asked these scholars to describe their perceptions of what they considered their discipline to entail, including its modes of inquiry, key concepts, organizing principles and relationships to other disciplines.
This information provided Professor Phenix with data required to formulate a comprehensive model for general education that placed the disciplines in categories labeled realms of meaning. Findings were found to suggest six different, but interrelated realms based on the structural similarities among the disciplines within each realm.
All the sciences including social sciences were assigned to the realm of empirics.
All languages including mathematics were assigned to the realm of symbolics.
All the arts were assigned to the realm of aesthetics.
The school subjects, history, geography, and cultural anthropology were assigned to the realm of synoptics. Philosophy and religion were also included in this realm.
The realm of ethics included matters of morality and ethical decision making.
Self-knowledge and self-understanding were included in the realm of synnoetics.
The disciplines in each realm were viewed as ways of creating and communicating knowledge with structural similarities that facilitate transfer from one to another within each realm.
The social sciences were taken out of humanities and placed within the science realm. Mathematics was recognized as a language like all languages having a vocabulary, syntax, and a dynamic structure. Geography, history, and cultural anthropology were recognized as having a synoptic role that draws upon and integrates the findings of disciplines from other realms.
Ethics and morality are given an official seat at the table of general education.
Self-knowledge and self-understanding are recognized as having a central role in acquiring maximized meaning from the studies of general education involving the study of life in all its manifestations.
Phenic’s schematic regarding realms of meaning brings order to the hodgepodge of subjects that are now offered in the general education programs of conventional schools. This schematic is consistent with accomplishing the missions of education as defined by Psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, to wit: To enable human nature itself to change, to enable each generation to transmit to the next whatever wisdom it has gained about living, and to free the enormous untapped creative potential which lies latent in varying degrees in the preconscious processes of everyone.
If students were to engage the disciplines utilizing their methods and materials adapted to developmental differences consistent with known principles not only regarding appropriate developmental experiences but also consistent with known matters in the development of groups as teams of learners, and with an understanding of learning as a cumulative process that must be completed to be effective and lasting. If the above three missions would be achieved that would result in personally competent and productive achievements in mental health and effective citizenship.
A specific example of this process involved this author's facilitating a group of seventh graders in a typical classroom with a diversity of student interests and abilities, utilizing the methods and materials of history and geography focused on an in-depth study of their local area. Having assembled primary information drawn from original sources, students set about creating a vision of life as it evolved in their communities from inception throughout the early years of development.
This study included physical geography which involves an in-depth study of what existed in their local territory including the bedrocks, soils, relief features, vegetation, fauna, climate, weather, and location. Constructing an iconic model that looks like what is being represented, that shows the relationships between the parts of the system to which they belong and provides a vision of the setting within which occurred the social cultural factors of inhabitants, economic processes and formation of political structures and processes. Putting together these variables into a system was the outcome.
Contrast this experience with sitting through presentations of isolated bits of someone else’s information culminated with a test for recall.
These seventh-grade level students facilitated by this author created an integrated view of what life had to offer in the most familiar place in their experience, their community. That laid the groundwork for understanding life as it occurs in other areas of the country, the world, and beyond.
Furthermore, having created the structures of meaning they were able to retain and build upon that experience in the years to come.
That experience also defines the earlier experiences that would lead to maximized inquiry within the studies at the 7th grade and beyond in high school and college.
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