<p>Alas, this was not at all true for the class my D sat in on during her visit to Brown.</p>
<p>She selected the class from a list available from the admissions office as a good course to attend. The tour guide had strongly encouraged parents to also sit in on a class, and so I went along for this one. It was a lecture class, called “Introduction to XYZ” (don’t want to get too specific but it is a topic about which both my D and I know something, but not too much). </p>
<p>Let me tell you, it was not impressive. The treatment of the subject was superficial and simplistic. Neither the professor nor the 30+ students in the room gave any indication that they wanted to be in the class. The professor was just working through the slides. The students were not attentive. There was a feeble attempt to get some student participation going (e.g, show a slide of a boy at his bar-mitzvah and ask the class to guess his age- yes, someone answered correctly). As soon as the time was up and the lecture was over, the students bolted. Nobody stuck around to discuss the topic further, and anyway it would not have been possible because the professor left in a hurry too. If there is one word to summarize this spectacle, it is “apathy”.</p>
<p>This was the first college class my D had attended as part of a visit. After the class, I waited for her reaction to the class, without sharing my own opinion. She thought the level of instruction was below the level she enjoyed in her high school in sophomore year. She told me that she was horrified that classes in college were so bad. She had really been looking forward to stimulating classes in college- after this class at Brown she wasn’t sure any more. Fortunately later that week she sat in on three classes at Harvard, one at Swarthmore, three at Penn and four at Georgetown. All these classes ranged from good to excellent. The students were interested and engaged. My D’s faith in college was restored.</p>
<p>Perhaps that one class at Brown was an anomaly. I am sure there must be some really good classes at Brown. But I have to say I wince every time I read comments like the one quoted. An open curriculum certainly does not “guarantee” anything.</p>
<p>(re “great minds”): I dunno. I don’t have some great list of Brown alumni in my head, but Wikipedia gives me Charles Evans Hughes, Richard Holbrooke, Ted Turner, Bobby Jindal, and the critical builder of McKinsey & Co. Plus there’s Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening), Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex), Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), and a whole passel of intelligent actors and musicians. </p>
<p>My daughter has always maintained, though, that there is a strain of anti-intellectualism at Brown, and that the open curriculum attracts people who are really not committed to academic inquiry as a value. So maybe it doesn’t produce as many academics as some other places. I don’t know. The kids whom I see going there don’t seem anti-intellectual to me, but she knows them better.</p>
<p>Obviously, no system is going to work well with poor advising. Brown puts a lot of stress on advising in its materials and presentations; I don’t know what the reality is. </p>
<p>However, a kid who really thinks that he or she will make terrible choices in the absence of rules should not be going to ANY elite research university, and the admissions departments ought to be trying hard not to admit them. There aren’t any curricular rules – except perhaps for something like St. John’s, where everything is determined for the first three years – that can save a student from himself.</p>
<p>But that BECAME the reality for my son. I think he entered college figuring that he’d develop more focus amidst a stimulating, intellectual environment and the support of the close advising his college promised – and the reality was something more like vicariousparent found when visiting Brown. There WERE some really amazing profs, and there were some real duds. The student body was the same way – some brilliant kids, some not so brilliant. So 2 years down the line my son found himself with no clear goals and no good foundation toward anything – and I think he realized that if he stayed in school at that point he would end up graduating with a degree that meant little to him and no clear idea of a career path. </p>
<p>One thing that really hurt him was that when my son transferred to a college with a more typical structure, he found he had a lot of general ed requirements that had not been met. He was able to get waivers in some areas by getting the course syllabi from his first college – and he met some other gen ed requirements by taking a few online community college courses over the summer. I mean – you really don’t want to be a college junior, trying to focus on your major, and realize you’ve got to complete a bunch of courses filled with freshman. </p>
<p>So in hindsight, I don’t really think its a good idea for a student to opt for an open-curriculum school UNLESS they have a strong sense of what they want to study. My son entered as “undeclared” with an open mind… 2 years later he left, still “undeclared”… still open-minded. He had actually self-selected a fairly broad range of courses - some sciences, a foreign language, humanities – but he didn’t have any more of a sense of direction 2 years in than when he had started. One of his best friends started out pre-med – the young man graduated on track, and while I don’t know whether he ended up in med school, I do know that pre-med lays a good foundation for just about any life science major.</p>
<p>calmom, what would have been different for your son if he had gone to Chicago or Columbia (i.e., in curricular terms, the anti-Browns)? He would have taken a fairly broad range of courses – some humanities and philosophy, some social science, math, some hard science, a smidge of art or music – and he could easily have come to the end of his second year with no direction. There isn’t a general-education requirement in the world that will give a kid direction. If anything, they can impede direction, by nudging kids (fairly hard) to go broad before they go deep.</p>
<p>One of my kids started out at Chicago as a pre-med. When he decided in the middle of his second year to get off the pre-med track, he had taken a grand total of one course that was not either part of the required core (and therefore a general, interdisciplinary survey) or a pre-med requirement (and therefore a general single-disciplinary survey, of a discipline he no longer wanted to follow). As it happened, that course was part of the major he chose, although it was not a typical course for that (or any other) major, and he didn’t know that would be his major when he took it. He had to will some direction on himself, and he’s lucky that he turned out to like the direction he took.</p>
<p>(The core DID have something to do with that. In one of his core courses, he had spent five or six weeks on key texts from his new field of concentration, and he had liked them and the discussion they provoked very much. So maybe that IS a victory for the core curriculum. You decide.)</p>
<p>I have a D at an open curricilum college and 1 at a more structured one with GenEd requirements. All in all, they are getting similar overall coursework although 1 is heavier in science b/c she likes science. When I did a BSN nursing program about 25 years ago I was looked at by many with a “why bother with all those <em>other</em> classes like sociology and geography when all you need are nursing and some science to do your job?”. I got tired of explaining that I felt I had a more extensive and well-rounded (for lack of a better term) education…I loved Soc of Religion and Stats…also the geography class. I guess we could all just take the courses required for “the job” but isn’t it wiser to have a full education? Yes, either way I am a nurse, but I also have knowledge of a lot of other things…thanks to the GenEd courses and the required additional humanities…FWIW.</p>
<p>Yes, absolutely. No college is going to work for all students. </p>
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<p>JHS, I am so curious what is meant by this statement. Perhaps it is my public school/state college pov, but the idea that someone with even a whiff of anti-intellectualism around them could even get into Brown is downright confusing to me. Ditto kids who are really not committed to academic inquiry as a value.</p>
<p>Considering the gpa, standarized test scores, class rank and so on of the very few who get accepted, when does this shift happen?</p>
JHS, that statement is terribly demeaning and shows an extreme lack of insight on YOUR part as to what is going on in the minds of kids who are concerned about an unstructured curriculum. If anything the reverse is probably true – Brown is probably selective enough to weed out the slackers, but open-curriculum colleges that are somewhat less selective may be places where a lot of students are unfocused. </p>
<p>The student who is concerned about the lack of structure might be smart enough to recognized their own tendencies – in the same way that a kid who has a family history of alcoholism might wisely avoid colleges where drinking seems to be a dominant form of the campus culture. That is, the latter kid might think, “I don’t drink now, but I don’t know if I will be able to avoid the temptation if everyone around me is drinking.” Is that a kid who doesn’t deserve to go to college, because drinking is common on most college campuses? Or is that simply a kid who is smart enough to anticipate problems in advance and avoid them?</p>
<p>I do think your statement also evidences a lack of understanding about how college course selection and registration really works. It’s not simply a matter of choosing from a menu of classes – its a matter of making them all fit the schedule and of trying to get into classes where the profs are reputed to be good and trying to avoid the ones where that is not the case. Its easy for someone with the best of intentions to go astray when the actual options before them are not ideal – whereas the student who has to meet a set of external requirements will have to find a way, even if it means taking a course that meets at 8am, or on Friday afternoons, or is taught by an unpopular prof.</p>
<p>This isn’t about Brown, but about Smith which also has open curriculum
It is my first choice BECAUSE of open curriculum. I have clear goals and feel a core or even distribution requirements would come in the way of this goal.
Also, I know i would resent a core. They work for some kids, but I have issues with mandates and authority.
But that’s just me. Some kids need a core</p>
<p>Re Smith: If you want to graduate with Latin honors (e.g., cum laude), then you need to take one course from each of 7 areas. Also, I believe the engineering major has the same requirement. So, while you can go through with no distribution, seems that Smith feels it isn’t optimal.</p>
<p>^^with that though, you still have alot of choices.
Some schools require a chem class, whereas at smith your science could be ecology or physics…</p>
<p>i just think it allows for far more choices…I feel this is optimal</p>
<p>It’s true that you do have a lot of choices, but I think that’s pretty typical of similar schools that have stated requirements. Maybe there are schools that require a chem class–we haven’t run into them. The ones we’ve been looking at all offer a fairly wide range of options to satisfy requirements, with the only really specific one being a freshman writing class.</p>
<p>My daughter started her college search thinking that she wanted a school with a strong core so that she could know that her classmates would know something when they graduated. (A variation of what JHS termed “teenage proto-fascism”?) Now she’s a freshman at Brown. Maybe it is partly because she started thinking more about what she would do and worried less about what other students would be doing, though being around lots of smart people remained one of desired qualities for her school.</p>
<p>Brown is a good place for DD-- a possible math or physics major with varied interests, including art history. I wish she would take a European History but don’t know that she will. But, as qidah pointed out, learning is lifelong. I had very little interest in history in college when I took a single course to meet a distribution requirement. The course didn’t change that. Twenty-five years later I discovered Teaching Company history courses and enjoy them greatly. (I enjoy the math, science, and religion courses too.) On the other hand Art History (also to meet a distribution requirement) was an unexpected pleasure.</p>
<p>On cocktail parties-- I never have occasion to attend cocktail parties-- do people really talk about Socrates and Dubliners and chemical reactions? I suspect it is more often office gossip, kids, and other shared interests. And when it gets a little more intellectual, I think the guest with a rather narrow passion is as likely or more likely to be interesting than the one who knows everything.</p>
<p>As I think about the cocktail party situation it strikes me that broad requirements prepare us to be consumers and depth requirements prepare us to be producers. I probably need some background knowledge to understand the guest with a passion (consume what that guest has to say). I need to know more to have something to say that could be interesting. The debate about whether education should be prepare us to be consumers or producers is not new. (By “producer” I mean someone who knows enough to advance the field; I don’t mean manufacturer.) An open curriculum gives the student, the one most directly affected by the debate, the opportunity to decide the question for self.</p>
<p>mom58, not much happens at cocktail parties and I usually avoid them, but we live in the Boston area with lots of universities and high-end consulting firms and can have some extraordinary conversations in smaller groups at dinner parties. It is not clear to me whether a core or open curriculum serves one better to participate in these events. What is most useful in such events (and likely in life) is is the ability to continue to learn and thus, the most important thing one can learn in college is how to learn new fields and assimilate new ideas. Is it obvious whether a core curriculum or a an open one is better at teaching someone how to learn on his/her own?</p>
<p>Distribution requirements and a core are very different things, as different as open curriculum.</p>
<p>It all has more to do with what the student brings to the table. It’s likely that in most cases, the same student doesn’t emerge all that different in alter life whichever option s/he follows.</p>
<p>Cocktail parties I have attended seem to break down like this: Doctors talk about stocks, lawyers talk about billable hours, physicists (I know many – leave near Brookhaven National Labs) talk about how student the rest of us are, many profs talk about how dense their students are (ugh – unpleasant) and English Professors (a group I belong to) talk about sex. Sexy poetry is included.</p>
<p>The photographers my husband brings do talk about cameras.</p>
<p>This discussion hits home as I am really ambivalent about the college experience my freshman daughter will have as a film major at NYU. She´s wanted to go into filmmaking since she was in 8th grade so we´re both happy she could follow her dream in a great program. But I loved my college experience for the exposure to varied survey courses that provided me with a knowledge base in psychology, art history and literature as well as astronomy and biology for my science requirements. As a poli-sci major, I had more indepth classes in the related fields of econ and history and this has just served to give a better understanding of the world and current events. D has some general requirements, but this year, with the obligatory writing course, she has only room to select one class. Right now she´s in Intro to Psych and loves it, as I´m sure she would love so many other courses outside her field. However, with all her film classes she will be limited as to how much she can expand her horizons. Of course, she really loves her major too. Oh well, I guess you can´t have everything.</p>