The trouble with Brown (open curriculum yay or nay)

Parents Forum
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<p>So JHS brought up an interesting subject in the college visit thread. <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/787020-trouble-college-visits-7.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/787020-trouble-college-visits-7.html&lt;/a> (post #92)</p>

<p>Is an open curriculum a good or bad thing? Why can't a kid who wants a core, just take core-like courses at a place like Brown? </p>

<p>Is it a parent problem more than a kid problem? (I didn't encourage older son to look at Brown knowing he would take nothing but comp sci courses, but he managed to do just about the same thing at CMU, thanks to lots of AP credit.)</p>

<p>Should colleges have some sort of core curriculum? Is there some canon we all ought to be exposed to?</p>

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<p>As a educator I think the canon, if you will, has gotten so huge that one person cannot know it any longer. In the eighteenth century there was an agreed upon canon of knowledge that every person knew, and it usually included reading Latin and Greek.</p>

<p>Since the nineteenth century, and even more now, there has been an explosion of knowledge so that it really is impossible to be educated in all areas.</p>

<p>I think the best approach would be to give students skills to decode information from all areas. Should the student wish to discover something, s/he would have the skills and basic vocabulary to do so. For example, it’s not important to perform the integral to know what it is and how it functions.</p>

<p>It’s not important to read twentieth century fiction to be taught that the idea of an omniscient narrator fell away paralleling discoveries in psychology.</p>

<p>Do we need a core or distribution requirements to do this? I’m not sure. For many of our students it is accomplished in high school.</p>

<p>Certainly a politically savvy electorate has to understand many knotty concepts to judge positions on global climate change, cloning, stem-cell research, foreign policy.</p>

<p>With newspapers disappearing, we are going to need to work harder to maintain basic skills or television will be the source information. And unfortunately, it is easy for conglomerates to control the flow of information if that is the case.</p>

<p>However, I don’t think it accomplishes much to force a totally uninterested CS student to read Moby Dick. Nor do I think it accomplishes much to force a urban studies major to repeat her high school biology class or AP class.</p>

<p>Richard Feynman was brutal in his assessments of his humanities/English courses at MIT. Man, I wouldn’t have wanted to be his teacher.</p>

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<p>I think what is important is less the shared “canon” but that a college encourage 18 year olds to explore different ways of thinking. Distribution requirements or a core curriculum are each ways to do that, but they are certainly not the only ways. The reality of Brown is that the combination easy P/F option plus the open curriculum plus strong advising results in the same outcome. In reality, kids at Brown do take a range of course offerings. </p>

<p>Personally I’m not going to worry too much if my kid doesn’t get a perfectly balanced curriculum in college. Learning is a lifelong thing, and it is always possible to pick up what you’ve missed. That said, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with wanting structure–in which case why reinvent the wheel at a place like Brown when other schools offer it ready-made.</p>

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<p>I have one kid in a college with core requirements and one in a school with an open curriculum. It seems like the schools with the open currriculum model tend to be ones that are intensely hard to get into in the first place. In that case, yeah, go with the open curriculum. My humanities S took physics, college calculus, etc. before he ever got to his open curriculum college. What would be the point of doing it all over again? Especially at the expense of classes in his major fields that he’d be precluded from taking as a result.</p>

<p>My D goes to Flagship State U, and she did do a lot of core classes last year. She found out that once she got to college calculus that she didn’t really “hate math” – in fact, she rather enjoyed the puzzle of it all and did very well. Did it change her path in anyway to have enjoyed calculus? Not a jot. She’s done with it now and will never take another math class in her life. Would that time have been better spent on something she is interested in? Probably. She also took chemistry, which she did very well in (all A’s) but did not enjoy at all. She found it very tedious. Waste of time and money? Yes.</p>

<p>I have an romantic notion that people should be schooled in the canon… but in practical reality, it doesn’t look quite the same to me. So, I’m not sure. I guess it depends on how much they did in high school, and how much the core classes outside the student’s direct interest or major area contributes to their life in the big world.</p>

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<p>I have had real mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there are certain skills, especially those of critical reading and writing that I feel need to be inculcated into all college grads. In addition, freshmen year should be a year of exploration where kids can be exposed to different subjects in order to decide what majors interest them.</p>

<p>On the other hand, having a broad smattering of many different courses in many areas doesn’t seem to accomplish as much as many would like. This should also be weighed against the argument by some ( not me) who feel that those with high SATS/ACTs in an area should be exempt from taking a basic course in that area. Lets face it: should a person who gets 700 on the math SAT have to take math if they are a political science or history major?Likewise, should a math major who did very well on the verbal and writing part of the SAT have to take english?</p>

<p>Personally, I would get rid of core requirements per se, especially those that have a “chinese menu” approach such as a course among various groups. Instead. I would requre everyone to take at least three to four interdisciplanary courses in english/literature that develop strong critical thinking and writing. These can include at least one course in philosophy. I would also require a course in logic,since this subject seems to be missing among many college graduates. Finally, I would require a course in basic personal finance that teaches things like: understanding a tax return, geting out of debt, understanding investments etc. This is a subject that far too few Americans don’t know enough about and should be incorporated into all curriculums.</p>

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<p>The canon began disappearing during the 60’s, for many reasons. Explosion of knowledge, yes, and all the new media for acquiring it (including the Internet). Less emphasis on content and more on process. Relativism was in vogue, in general. Perhaps most importantly, the increasing importance of diversity, and the political “uncorrectness” of anything having to do with dead white males, had a huge effect. Saying that any one thing was important to learn, inevitably would be considered discriminatory, or even imperialist!</p>

<p>Brown advising does serve to encourage more broad-based classes for students. In the case of computer science, the extensive requirements for the B.S., as opposed to the BA, mean fewer classes in other areas like the humanities anyway.</p>

<p>I think that what does need to change at Brown is the sometimes extreme specialization of courses. Many posters here stated that their sons or daughters already had a good educational background from which to move on to the kind of exploration Brown can offer.</p>

<p>However, now that Brown has joined other Ivies in being need blind (as of, I think 4 or 5 years ago), this can be a problem for those whose backgrounds are not so rigorous. Colleges like Brown go prospecting for low-income kids, or kids who did not have the opportunities of private or top public schools, but show “potential.” </p>

<p>At a flagship state university, you will find survey courses in, for instance, U.S. History, but Brown might offer “history of textiles in the deep South in the 19th century.” I made that up, but I hope my point is clear.</p>

<p>So Brown’s system worked great for graduates of privileged prep schools back in 1972.</p>

<p>For students who know what they want to learn, and who have broad interests, the open curriculum is like being able to choose your own candy at the candy store. For students who have narrower interests, it can be like being able to eat all nougat centers without ever trying the cream. For students who do not know what they want to focus on, it can mean freedom to explore, and advising can help with that, but it can also be stressful. And some really do take classes in the major plus whatever looks easiest to get by in other areas.</p>

<p>I think it depends on the kid’s personality a lot, too.</p>

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<p>I agree with the above poster. I didn’t want to specifically dis Brown so I kept my comments general.</p>

<p>My daughter’s best guy friend just graduated from Brown. His degree was in “creative non-fiction.” ??? Not English. He graduated having read “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s much read essay, but he did not know that DFW was a major novelist nor that he had recently passed away. He had never heard of Keruouac. </p>

<p>It’s not going to make a difference in his life because he had already been accepted to Mt. Sinai med school in a program that targets humanities majors. Still, as an educator, I was pretty shocked.</p>

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<p>This started (on another thread) with my being struck by a throw-away, completely typical line about a kid’s reaction to Brown – “I need a little more structure than that”. And I thought, I’ve heard or read that countless times, including from my own kids, but it doesn’t make any sense. Why would a kid who is a legitimate candidate for Brown really need general curricular structure at all?</p>

<p>After all, Brown’s open curriculum doesn’t stop anyone from taking exactly the same courses she would take at Harvard, or Williams, or wherever. And all indications are that 95% of the students at Brown (or Amherst, or Smith, or anywhere else without explicit general education requirements) do just that. It isn’t that Brown. institutionally, doesn’t value a broad education. Brown ensures it by mainly admitting the sorts of students who will opt for that. So why do kids (and parents) often react negatively to that?</p>

<p>My conclusion, I guess, is that it is fundamentally a question of immaturity, and what I termed teenage proto-facism. They don’t like the idea that there are no rules, even if THEY, personally, don’t need rules to do what they think is the right thing. Maybe they are afraid that other students will “abuse” the lack of rules, without considering that those other students may have valid, interesting reasons to do what they do.</p>

<p>Why do colleges have general education requirements in the first place? I understand the desire to make a statement about what an appropriate education is. If I were King of some university, I have little doubt that I would legislate my idea of the greatest good, too. However, I note that at most elite universities, after it passes through various faculty committees, it winds up as a bunch of attenuated distributional requirements, salted perhaps with a few interdisciplinary freshman seminars. That was what my college was like, and it was largely irrelevant. In four years, and 36 courses, there were exactly two courses I took in order to meet distributional requirements. They were entertaining, and stimulating, but contributed absolutely nothing to my overall education. One was a Bio for Poets course, taught by a Nobel lauriate, no less. But my real collegiate science education came from living with a couple of future medical researchers, and reading some of the things they were interested in. (One of my senior roommates and I did a reading program on Sociobiology, which was that year’s big thing.)</p>

<p>That’s what universities are for, to some extent. Bringing people with different interests together, and see what happens. Distributional requirements don’t add a heck of a lot to that.</p>

<p>Some universities opt for some sort of core curriculum. That has the added benefit of creating a shared culture and frame of reference among students, but it comes at a fairly high cost. In the end, a lot of the core courses are neither fish nor fowl – boring to students with prior interest in that area, and oppressive to students who don’t care about it, and the two groups annoy the hell out of each other and make the classes less pleasant for the groups in the middle who might be liking them. And most of the core schools still pull back from making creative writing majors and pre-meds sit in the same science classrooms. (Although some creative writing majors choose to do that anyway.)</p>

<p>In the final analysis, I think requirements are mainly marketing on the part of colleges, something to attract the students who like the ideas expressed by the systems. As an adult, I think I would have to vote for Brown’s approach as being the best – the only one that is fundamentally respectful of the students it is admitting, and that guarantees that every course will be full of students who are eager to be there.</p>

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<p>I can never decide what I think about survey courses. I audited the art history survey course and loved it, but felt no need to write the papers. OTOH later I took a graduate level seminar on “Chinese Language Painting of the Sung Dynasty” and the sort of reading and writing we did for that course taught me more about how art historians think (at the least one style of art historian) than most survey courses will. However I did love the courses I took that were all aimed at non-majors - a computer programming course for regular folks, a survey of western political thought, a course in Greek literature in translation, and a history of East Asia (though I only took the Chinese half.)</p>

<p>Mythmom you would probably be shocked that I’ve made it through my education without having to read James Joyce (well I think I read some of the Dubliners) or Faulkner (except “The Bear”). I used to keep a long list of books I ought to read, I should revive it. OTOH, I never claimed to be any kind of English major, so perhaps I can be forgiven. I’ve read the canon for architecture, I think.</p>

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<p>I love the open curriculum at Brown, and I think that parents trying to control what classes their children take are micromanaging.</p>

<p>If this kid likes Computer Science, why the hell are you holding him back? If he likes it enough to conflict with anyone about it, then he’d probably be good at it. And it’s a practical field. What’s the problem?</p>

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<p>JHS, I think its appropriate and a sign of maturity when a teenager realizes that they do better in a more structured environment. My son’s top choice college was very structured, but they did not offer financial aid. The 2nd choice offered a generous aid package, and had a very open educational approach, little structure & his 3rd choice was UC Berkeley. There was a somewhat agonized decision process, because my son preferred the freedom offered by choice #2, but was uncertain whether he would do well. I also felt that my son did better with more structure – but he opted for choice #2 after a visit to the campus.</p>

<p>Well… what happened was exactly as predicted. Because college #2 had a system where profs write individual end-of-course evaluations of the students, I have a good picture of what happened. Basically my son started off well but kind of drifted over time. Part of the problem was that despite the open curriculum, there was limited space availability in classes – and while my son always had a couple of his top choices each semester there always seemed to be one class he wasn’t that interested in, but had to take to round out his schedule. He got A’s in the most difficult & most structured classes, like chemistry - where there were regular homework assignments and lab. He got C’s, D’s, & incompletes in courses where there was little structure – and after 2 years had essentially completed about 3 semesters of work with a 3.0 GPA. (think: 2 A’s for every D)</p>

<p>He did well later on at a public college following a more standard approach. </p>

<p>I don’t think its a pro or con issue with Brown – I think that it is a system that will fit one kid’s learning style better than another. My son has ADHD tendencies – he tends to get very focused on projects he is interested in, will lose track of other things, and tends to procrastinate. He’s independent natured and tends to want to carve out his own way of doing things, but my observation was that he needed a set of very clear, specific rules that he could seek to modify as needed, rather than being left on his own to create the structure. </p>

<p>My daughter’s very different – she was very much intrigued by Brown – and somewhat disappointed to realize that her chosen college had a rather extensive list of distribution requirements – I’m sure she would have done fine in an unstructured environment. On the other hand, I think she benefited from being required to take classes she would not have otherwise taken. She chose astronomy for her mandatory year of lab science – and told me that she learned more in that class than in any others she had that year. She was probably learning more precisely because it was an area outside of her main interests and focus – she went from knowing almost nothing about astronomy to knowing quite a lot. So I think it was valuable for her, even though she probably would have done just fine in academic environment where she could have skipped math & science entirely. </p>

<p>But I think these issues about academic planning and structure are much more important in term of finding the right “fit” than worrying about the fashion choices of other students on a campus visit. There really are many intelligent, engaging people who do better in more structured settings – its no sign of weakness to recognize that tendency at the outset.</p>

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<p>Oh no, mathmom. Not shocked. I find you charming and cultured without Dubliners or “The Bear.” It was the narrowness of the major I was focusing on. And I do understand JHS point, and concur to a point also, but the student involved had no idea of all he was missing. He was not making informed choices, and no one was informing him.</p>

<p>In the end, though, I think we generally find out what we want and need to know. And JHS – in my son’s case, I agree. It was immaturity. My daughter balanced Brown and Barnard for her ED application and NYC won. The distribution requirements were a bit of a bitter pill, but in the end she had the same experience as Calmon’s D, she benefitted from them. In fact, she received her only A+ in one of those courses, which is a big smile for her GPA vis a vis law school.</p>

<p>She was shocked at how many women in her biology class did not know how to do a graph or set up an experiment. (That wasn’t the A+ class, but she had had extensive science background and did excel there. Would not have been the case as she moved up the pecking order.)</p>

<p>Different schools do have differing pedagogies beyond the question of distribution requirements. It is almost impossible for high students (and their parents) to parse the differences.</p>

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<p>Well, at least for me, I didn’t hold back my computer science son, but the fact remains that he’s going to offer limited conversation at a cocktail party. If you like sci fi, fantasy and computer and board games he can talk to you, but his knowledge of history and literature is basically at the level of the AP courses he took in high school.</p>

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<p>I went to Bennington, where the curriculum was wide open, and I basically chose my courses for the teachers…I graduated as an English major without ever studying Shakespeare. And I regret it. I was determined my D would have a better education, but she is totally self-directed (much more than I was), and plans to study theater, period. She insisted on taking a senior Shakespeare class as a freshman in high school, and aced it, but biology eludes her. Everyone is so different! But I agree with JHS that respect is key, and a student who feels the respect from his/her school will be more likely to choose courses well.</p>

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<p>

Would a history fanatic “not held back” in the same way have much knowledge of board games and science fiction?</p>

<p>Anyway, doesn’t a medium-size core with AP/IB-test-outs represent a middle way?</p>

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<p>Someone made the point on a different thread related to open curriculum that sometimes it weakens a school because certain key departments become seriously undersubscribed. Open curriculum forces students into these departments allowing for department strength and sufficient faculty presence for those souls interested in these departments. (Astronomy has been mentioned here, which my son also took to satisfy distribution requirements.)</p>

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<p>Curricular flexibility was one of the top criteria in guiding my son’s choice of schools and he is attending a school with an open curriculum. Brown was also high on his list of choices but I know it less well. What follows therefore is educated speculation about what might be in the heads of the kids JHS was reacting to and is not intended as a criticism of Brown.</p>

<p>There are probably a couple of dangers with an open curriculum. The first is that some math/science kids won’t take humanities and that some humanities kids will not take math/science. [Just so that the wrath of the political correctness police won’t come down and haunt me, I am not saying that all math/science kids won’t take humanities and vice versa, but that this will happen some percentage of the time but I am certain that it will not happen to your sons or daughters]. Let me speculate that there aren’t that many kids who say, “Oh no, if I go to a school that doesn’t force me to take science, I won’t take it. Therefore, I’ll go to a school with more structure.”</p>

<p>The second is that with no structure, there is a chance of going adrift. (“If there is no curriculum and I don’t know what I want to do, there is a chance that I will just bounce from thing to thing without a plan and to avoid that, I’d like a bit of structure.”) I suspect that this is the more likely concern of the kids in the earlier thread whose rationale JHS was having difficulty understanding. Some kids will have an some inchoate sense that there is a risk for them.</p>

<p>The advisory system is intended to provide some of the scaffolding in an open curriculum school that is provided by a core curriculum at other schools. So, the question is whether the advisors really take their mentoring/scaffolding job seriously. Professors at a small LAC choose to teach there because they want to teach and guide undergraduates (they may do some research, but their interest in teaching and mentoring follows from their choice). Professors at a research institution are judged primarily based upon their research. Many will see an advisory function for freshman and sophomores not in their fields as a distraction, one more function that they have to fulfill perfunctorily so that they can get back to their research and grad students. As such, I’d be surprised if an open curriculum worked well at a big research university.</p>

<p>Brown is in the middle. It is a research university and at one level wants to compete with the research universities. Tenure gives high weight to research (though I read in a post here that they also weigh teaching somewhat). But, it is a research institution with an undergraduate focus. I suspect that whether a professor is an engaged advisor or a rubber-stamp advisor will depend upon personal preference, but that they need not be. And, for students with an advisor who deals with the advising in a perfunctory way, there is a real risk of being adrift. I’ve heard mixed things about how that functions at Brown. Some advisors are very engaged, though the one of my colleagues, whose daughter recently graduated and loved Brown, felt that it was an institution that warehoused very bright students. Probably a bit unfair, but I suspect that he was referring in part to the lack of direction that kids can have. It is possible that the potential not to have the scaffolding when one needs it is what concerns the kids in question. </p>

<p>As far as I know, Brown’s advisory system might work incredibly well. But, because Brown gets an extraordinary group of bright, motivated kids, many will do well whether or not they have the scaffolding that would come with an effective advisory system. So, the fact that many Brown students love Brown does not mean that the advisory system is working for the kids who need the scaffolding. I suppose that not having the scaffolding when it is needed is not an unreasonable thing to fear.</p>

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<p>Note that some open curriculum schools still have plenty of requirement for the majors. English departments can require Shakespeare if they think he’s essential.</p>

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<p>Quote from Shawbridge (sorry I don’t know how to do the quote thingy)</p>

<p>“The second is that with no structure, there is a chance of going adrift. (“If there is no curriculum and I don’t know what I want to do, there is a chance that I will just bounce from thing to thing without a plan and to avoid that, I’d like a bit of structure.”) I suspect that this is the more likely concern of the kids in the earlier thread whose rationale JHS was having difficulty understanding. Some kids will have an some inchoate sense that there is a risk for them.”</p>

<p>I think this observation is an accurate reflection of what some kids THINK (it may or may not reflect reality, but we’re talking about 18-19-year-olds here.) This may have been part of my own D’s uncertainty about Brown — she has so many far-ranging interests that I think she might have felt too tempted by what she PERCEIVED as a lack of structure. Ultimately, and ironically, this particular kid came to a similar, if mirror-image, conclusion about UofChicago, Columbia, et.al.; she didn’t want to be constricted (again, an 18-yy-old’s PERCEPTION, not reality) by the requirements of a core curriculum. </p>

<p>But I think that for most kids (and parents), after all the objective research, the due diligence, the assessment, weighing pros and cons – perception is the critical, subjective and very personal trump card in this decision. And the perception may or may not turn out to be accurate (or even important, as the student’s acacemic career evolves).</p>

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<p>“because Brown gets an extraordinary group of bright, motivated kids”
One thing I often wonder, with an “academic-freedom-all-the-way” environment like Brown, how come I d</p>