The trouble with Brown (open curriculum yay or nay)

Parents Forum
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<p>In the end, I think JHS is right. It is a student’s responsibility to be in charge of his/her own education. The school may guide, require, but the student committed to learning will find a way, and the student committed to sliding by will also find a way.</p>

<p>Most college academic experiences are determined by who the teacher assigned to the particular course is.</p>

<p>A dear friend teaches at Brown; she’s awesome. My young friend who took a course in “creative non-fiction” and read only Harper’s magazine at Brown was unlikely.</p>

<p>From my very limited observations, the profs are Barnard are more consistent that the profs at Williams. And their pedagogy at Barnard is startlingly uniform (and strong.) That said, although my S’s English lit course wasn’t as interesting as the one I teach at CC (if I may so immodestly say), his Classical Drama course had one of the most creative teachers and minds I’ve ever encountered, and that’s only hearsay through S.
He wrote a score for the Oresteia for one of his projects, and it was a lit class.</p>

<p>Barnard offered nothing that free-wheeling.</p>

<p>I doubt we could have gleaned all this knowledge going in.</p>

<p>That said, both kids went over and above distribution requirements. D took a course in Roman History, for example, that was total unrequired, as well as symbolic logic. S is now taking a two semester Art History course although his division one requirement for something in the arts was abundantly met by his music minor.</p>

<p>I’m sure you all have stories like this with your kids.</p>

<p>Brown encourages inquiry one way; other schools in another. I am sure the goals are fairly consistent of colleges that are not tech schools, business schools, art schools or conservatories: to turn out literate, numbers literate, thoughtful folks with a fairly broad understanding of what constitutes their world.</p>

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<p>Well, it’s water over the bridge, but it made for an excruciatingly bad experience from start to finish and exposed a weak advising system.</p>

<p>GFG:
Poring over course evaluations can be a truly dismal experience. Setting aside ratings of profs and/or TFs, a lot of evaluations of Core courses at Harvard are along the lines of:
“an easy/painless way to fulfill the Core requirements.” That does not sound like a ringing call to intellectualism. For that reason, I and S were very taken with the Brown students’ enthusiasm for the courses they were taking “because everybody in the class wants to be there.” </p>

<p>I also think that Gen Ed courses are not meant only to address the lacunae of a high school education, but to lay the foundations for future (life-long) learning. The Brown students I have met are no more introspective or obsessed with the meaning of life than the students I know who went to other schools.</p>

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<p>The interesting thing is that my instinct is different. I don’t have actual experience with Brown, but I have seen what happened with my kids at Chicago. </p>

<p>My daughter liked the idea of the Core intellectually; in practice not so much. She was very clear and focused about wanting to study English literature. She was pretty miserable until she got past her first Core-heavy quarters, and by her second year she was taking graduate courses in her field. She ultimately believed that the Core was something of a sham – she loved her Core social science course, but everything else seemed like overbroad, unfocused surveys, and her science-for-poets courses were far from rigorous. She kept her eye on the ball, and had a very satisfactory experience in her major, but the Core ate up a lot of her willingness to explore things outside her major and adjacent fields. In the end, she really took only a couple of non-Core-related electives that were at all outside her comfort zone (out of 48 total classes), and a lot of her engagement in the Core felt like a waste of time, not because it was outside her comfort zone but because it was too familiar and too basic. (Also, P/F might have gotten her to take real science courses rather than watered-down ones. Intellectually, she wanted the former, but not enough to compete with 60 pre-meds in a curved class.)</p>

<p>Her brother started college with no clear idea of what he wanted to study – and a resentful attitude that he should be expected to focus – but the artificial, self-imposed discipline of wanting to go to medical school. He loved the idea of the Core, and liked its execution, too – it confirmed his generalist, big-idea tendencies. Working with his advisor, he dutifully plotted a track that would get him through the Core and also his pre-med requirements. Unfortunately, as time went on it was clear that he was miserable as a pre-med, and that he was getting weeded out by weed-out Organic Chemistry. But one of his parents (the other one) really liked direction being a pre-med gave him, and guilt-tripped him into sticking with it and trying harder. The result could have been disastrous. He could easily have made it well into his third year with absolutely no idea what he really wanted to study, and then have been scrambling to find a major he could complete in time to graduate. He could have had a total of three electives prior to mid-third year to test out his actual interests. That’s not quite his story, because he was able to pull the plug on pre-medism before the bitter end of his second year, and because he lucked out by really liking a field he decided to explore further based on one completely atypical course he had enjoyed, and lucked out further (with some parental help) by choosing required core major courses for his further exploration, so that if he liked it he would be in good shape. But if he had disliked those courses, he would have been up a pretty serious creek, because there would have been no major (other than ones he knew he disliked) that he would have met any requirements for before his third year</p>

<p>So . . . two different kids, both of whom had turned up their noses at places like Brown, and both of whom would probably have been better served by an open curriculum. One because she could have specialized earlier, and not wasted her exploratory slots on things that were unsatisfying and too close to her main interests. The other because he would have been able to experiment with different disciplines from the get-go, and thus really have been able to sample several before settling on one, and without having to give up his medical school dream to do it.</p>

<p>(Needless to say, these are my opinions only. My daughter would say, “Yeah, I probably would have liked Brown except for the anti-intellectual attitudes. Brown has better writing courses, too.” My son would say, “What are you talking about? I love the Core! It did give me at least a taste of many fields.”)</p>

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<p>JHS:</p>

<p>What you say about Chicago reflects my own reservation about Core/distribution requirements as experienced by my kids at two different institutions.
My S was concerned that the Chicago Core would restrict his ability to take advanced classes in his field. I liked the Core in the abstract although I had not really focused on the actual details. I suppose because it would have given my kids a taste of my own long ago French curriculum.
I think the distribution requirement at Harvard combined with the restricted range of course offerings in any given year can make for a less than exciting experience. At the same time, I understand that the faculty were concerned that if the categories were too broad, some students might be tempted to take only courses in Government or Econ to fulfill the Social Sciences requirement or courses only in, say, English poetry to fulfill the humanities requirement.
As for the Physics for Poets type of courses, this could be remedied if students were given Gen Ed credit for more advanced Physics classes.</p>

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<p>At Williams, S had to take regular majors’ astronomy course for science credits, and his physics course, Newton and Einstein, had the actual problem sets and Prereq of AP physics. So not Physics for Poets.</p>

<p>Well, they probably are on their right trajectory as arcane as it sometimes seems. D couldn’t stand Providence, so that ruled out Brown.</p>

<p>And even with its core Columbia seemed way more disorganized that Barnard.</p>

<p>I think all these schools have quirks and all have great opportunities.</p>

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<p>Marite–advising is always a mixed bag. Absolutely agree. D had fine advising at Wes, because she actively sought it out. S had lousy advising at Columbia, because he actively shunned it. I still think he would’ve had a better shot at figuring things out in time to right the ship at Wes, but I guess that’s not CU’s fault. They are what they are.</p>

<p>Back to Core–he adored his Lit hum classes, Music Hum and his sciences. He disliked the Civilization classes, Art Hum, and Major cultures. All of these reactions can be traced completely to his reactions to his instructors. He also will agree that he has a great framework (not just cocktail party talk), to build future learning on.</p>

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<p>Reading course evaluations of prospective schools is a great idea. We should have done that before we got this far in the process! D is in the middle of her official visits, and so is attending a class or two at each school. She can’t say that she’s been particularly inspired by any of these so far (though the one at Harvard was probably the best), but then they’re usually intro. classes. She’s still waiting for that Eurekea moment when she says “Here’s where I want to go to school!”</p>

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<p>My experience with the Yale distributional requirements of my youth illustrates both the problems that the Harvard faculty apparently feared, and their irrelevance.</p>

<p>I don’t remember the precise requirements, but there were four broad categories: Group I had literature and the arts, Group II had history and philosophy, and I don’t remember what else, Group III the social sciences, and Group IV math and lab sciences. I think you had to take at least ten courses outside the group of your major, including at least two in every group, except my Calculus AP got me one Group IV distributional credit, so I only ever took one Group IV course. My main focus was literary theory. I took a grand total of 12 courses outside Group I for credit (out of 36 total). Two were mainstream introductory philosophy courses. Five were economics courses. Three were law courses (which is interesting in retrospect, since when I took the first two I was not even considering law school) – although they masqueraded as political science, history, and management. One was an anthropology course in African-American Folklore, for which I successfully petitioned for credit towards my major requirements as a non-Western literature. (I wouldn’t have gotten it if I had needed Group III credits, but I had plenty of those. The paper I wrote was a pure analyse du texte, i.e., a literature paper.) And one was Bio For Poets.</p>

<p>Pretty unimpressive in the broad-education department.</p>

<p>On the other hand, somewhere among my mother’s papers is a yellowing certificate attesting to some faculty committee’s judgment that I had “the highest level of general culture” in my class – a patent lie, but something of a reminder that curriculum and course distribution are only part of the story.</p>

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<p>If I had my druthers, I would ditch the Harvard Core/Gen Ed and settle for much broader categories, similar to what you had, JHS.</p>

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<p>First, I didn’t say they were no science majors at Columbia. There are philosophy majors at MIT too. All the kids I know who were passionate about math/science applied to SEAS if they applied to Columbia at all, and not to CC. Kids sometimes go to CC and BECOME science majors, but I don’t know anyone who entered CC planning to major in physics. I’m not doubting that such a person exists–I just think they are uncommon at CC. </p>

<p>The intent of my statement was to disagree with the idea that the “core” meant Columbia would attract more well-rounded students than “open curriculum” Brown. Again, it’s simply anecdotal, but of the recent and current Columbia College students I know, not a one was a math/science person. They may have taken AP courses in bio, chem, and physics and aced them, but math/science just isn’t their passion. </p>

<p>Second, we all have colleges we like/dislike. Putting on my flameproof vest, I personally dislike Dartmouth and UPenn, which I find too pre-vocational. My impression is that too many of the students there have the attitude exhibited by one of our student posters in post #80, i.e., college is a time to pick up the degree you need to move on to the next level of training and/or get a job. The two Dartmouth grads I know who viewed college as laying a foundation for life long learning were miserable and unhappy there–though both praised the quality of the teaching. </p>

<p>I am also less enamored with Smith and UChicago than the parents who post on this board who have children there–although if I had a kid who wanted to attend either I wouldn’t try to talk them out of it. (I WOULD try to talk a kid out of going to Dartmouth or UPenn.) Philly is one of my very favorite cities, but …it can’t make up for the pre-professionalism at UPenn.</p>

<p>So, I don’t really mind if someone doesn’t think Brown is right for his/her kid. I can understand that someone who likes Dartmouth thinks that Brown students spend too much time “navel grazing.” I don’t think Dartmouth students do enough of it. (GFG’s comment makes a LOT more sense now that I know that GFG has a kid at Dartmouth.) I think of Dartmouth as the “Ivy for the future MBA.” People who get MBAs are sometimes brilliant, but only rarely are they intellectual. And, of course, Dartmouth is one of the Ivies where Greeks are strong, and I admit that I dislike frats and sororities intensely. Anyone else remember the description of the visiting Dartmouth students in Plath’s The Bell Jar? That’s still my mental picture of the typical Dartmouth student. </p>

<p>It is wonderful that students have all these choices. To me, it is simply silly to talk of “Ivy League schools” as anything other than an athletic league because each of the schools is different. </p>

<p>Each school does have a personality.There’s a bit of truth in the stereortypes. Brown students joke that Harvard students want to run the world, Princeton students want to own it, and Brown students want to save it. I’ve known kids who were really, really happy at all of them…and kids who were really, really miserable at all of them. Sometimes, the reasons for the reaction have very little to do with the college–a bad roommate situation, for example. But sometimes a particular college just is a bad match for a particular kid. </p>

<p>And, speaking as a parent, there’s always a bit of “what if?” when we reflect back on our kids’ experiences. I think my own kid would have made wiser courses choices at Brown than kid did with distribution requirements. I also think my kid would have taken some science courses S/NC. The pressure of wanting to get the highest possible GPA for law school meant kid wasn’t going to take science courses for science majors. (The college did not allow anyone to use APs to meet distribution requirements. )</p>

<p>So, there are different strokes for different folks. Not only are our kids different; we have different ideas of what constitutes a good education. I personally like both the core approach and the open curriculum approach and think distribution requirements are the worst possible compromise between the two. Obviously, not only YMMV, but it DOES vary. </p>

<p>Again, I’m not saying there are NO genuinely intellectual students at Dartmouth; there most definitely ARE. I just think there are more pre-professional --pick up my piece of paper for med/law/bus school–types there than at some other schools and it “flavors” the place. The number of students at Brown who “want to save the world” flavors it too. </p>

<p>Choice is a good thing.</p>

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<p>Jonri, I wish you’d been a fly on the wall during my MBA years. There are many, many intellectuals who end up getting MBA’s- just as there are many intellectuals who are orthodontists or car mechanics or winemakers or book editors. What one does professionally… or vocationally… can absolutely define the boundaries of one’s experience or not.</p>

<p>I don’t dispute that some college’s have fewer “intellectuals”, pound per pound, than other schools but I heartily disagree that it’s because of the future MBA’s. At Brown I found the pre-meds (or the folks majoring in Comp Lit but intending to go to med school) to be the outliers as far as intellectual curiosity was concerned- they were there to get their tickets punched. </p>

<p>I didn’t find it particularly gratifying to read the DMV manual in order to get a driver’s license- but it’s the only way to master the rules of the road. Similarly, B-school isn’t going to help anyone ponder the meaning of the universe, but it’s surely a short-cut to some very interesting and absorbing careers- which offer plenty of intellectual content for those so inclined.</p>

<p>And I met an accountant on an airplane recently who could moonlight as a Shakesperean scholar. (his planned career once he retires at his firm’s mandatory age.) He is almost done with his dissertation- and the travel that his job requires has allowed him to see perfomances of virtually every play written by Shakespeare or his contemporaries around the world. ( I would have said “around the Globe” but Globe jokes are verbotten by the MBA vocational police.)</p>

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<p>I never really thought there was a problem with Harvard’s original Gen Ed requirements. There were three general areas. Humanities, Social Science, Natural Science. There were broader courses that had Hum or SS or Nat Sci in the title. You had to take four semesters of each, or if you prefered to take courses offered by the departments you had to take twice as many. Since my major was humanities I was covered there. </p>

<p>For Social Science I took 2 semesters of western political theory, 1 semester of Chinese History and 1 semester of Sociology taught by David Riesman. For Nat Sci, I took 1 semester of Intro to Computer Science, 1 year of Calculus and 1 year of lab (premed type) physics. I had an AP in European History that may also have counted for something.</p>

<p>I audited a lot of courses and after my first year always took one extra course beyond the minimum pass/fail.</p>

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<p>What’s funny is that S’s first choice was not Dartmouth, but maybe they recognized in him a Dartmouth spirit, lol. I agree somewhat with the pre-professional characterization, but frankly Dartmouth has had a lot of success in preparing students for business careers and so the companies which come to recruit on campus reflect that success. That, in turn, encourages students who want job security to major in economics. Harvard lamented the same cycle there. I believe there was a CC thread about it. </p>

<p>S would have liked to take advantage of the no recording option at Dartmouth to take some academic risks a la Brown, but found it to be almost useless. Some departments don’t offer the option period, and those that do really restrict the courses for which it is available.</p>

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<p>jonri#130: I found that post very balanced and don’t see how a flame-proof vest was needed. I also thought my comments on Brown on this thread are not as unbalanced as to be characterized as ‘bashing’, but I’ll accept that it may have unfairly caricatured Brown’s policies as being too soft. </p>

<p>Yes, mileage does vary and individual selections can be very idiosyncratic, and you might say, irrational. My D hated Brown (for reasons I have already spelled out here), but she also hated Penn for the very reasons you cite- too pre-professional. That is the other Ivy she would never apply to. On the other hand, she still has Dartmouth on her list (probably not a good fit but she really enjoyed a summer camp she spent there so she’ll apply any way). She will apply to Columbia mainly because of the core curriculum, but the core at UChicago is not yet enough to make her overlook some of her other issues. Fortuntately, she can afford to be picky and arbitrary and still come up with a list of about 10 great schools that just happen to have varying degrees of selectivity.</p>

<p>I couldn’t agree more with your statement: </p>

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<p>Finally I do have to point out that I know a recent Columbia college graduate who was an absolute superstar in science- came in with loads of APs mostly in the sciences, majored in biology, and will go on to do an MD/PhD. His original first choice was Brown but eventually did not apply because he didn’t fancy Providence. He got into Yale and Columbia, but chose Columbia for financial reasons. He was very wary about the core curriculum going in, but now says he really enjoyed it and he is very happy that he was forced to go through it. No, he did not take organic chemistry in Houston.</p>

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<p>For the record…the young woman I met who took organic chem at UHouston was not a student at any of the colleges mentioned in this thread.</p>

<p>re #131: I’m genuinely glad to hear I am steretyping. But there is, IMO, a difference between the person who ends up getting a MBA or, for that matter, a law degree, after college, and the student who enters college with the idea that the primary purpose of going to college at all is to accumulate enough points in the game of life to get into a top business school or law school. (See post #80) If they could skip college entirely and go directly to Wharton, Harvard or Kellogg for a MBA, they would.</p>

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<p>Don’t mistake those hard-working, non-introspective types for intellectuals–they’re (for the lack of a better term) grinds!</p>

<p>Their hard work is not an attempt to engage seriously in the transformative power of their curriculum, encountering great works, great thinkers and great ideas and wrestling with those ideas as a way to better understand the world around them (and ultimately themselves and their place in it).</p>

<p>All that hard work is in order to get an ‘A’ to get to their next goal–med school, law school, B school etc. These students don’t really want to know what they themselves think about a particular work or idea–they want to know what the teacher or some authority thinks so they can get an ‘A’ on the next exam.</p>

<p>If you are going to lead the ‘life of the mind’, shouldn’t you have a good understanding of your own in the first place? Isn’t that what the ‘liberal’ is ‘liberal arts’ is all about–a ‘liberating’ of the mind. And if you don’t know what you believe, and why you believe it, how can you go about ‘freeing’ your mind? </p>

<p>Isn’t such introspection actually the first step to being an intellectual?</p>

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<p>mathmom: I am unfamiliar with Harvard’s Gen Ed, so I can only report what I was told about the reason why it was replaced by the Core. Apparently, it was felt that Gen Ed had become too catch-all, and there was no real coherence to it. So the Core was introduced, but, in my opinion, it’s half-baked, a compromise between those who would prefer to let students follow their bliss and trust that they will achieve a well-rounded education and the more prescriptive types who think students need more structure and guidance.
I’m not sure exactly what the source of dissatisfaction with the Core is; probably a combination of different and possibly conflicting reasons. At any rate, the new Gen Ed requirement includes 8 different distribution requirements (but some are overlapping and can be fulfilled with fewer courses).</p>

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<p>Jonri–I don’t want to get into a long side argument about Columbia, but I don’t understand your comments about science majors not going to Columbia College. That’s where the science majors are; SEAS is an engineering school. S knew scores of people who entered CC to be bio majors, biochem majors, chem majors, etc. Those are quite different from the SEAS majors. S himself entered as a declared Astrophysics major–that doesn’t exist in SEAS. Half his friends were pre-med, in CC, not SEAS. SEAS is “School of Engineering and Applied Science.” If you want pure science, the place for it is CC. It’s not a big deal, but your description is kind of misleading to anyone reading this.</p>

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<p>I agree with Garland.
I know a physics major who graduated from CC; my S would also have applied to CC, not SEAS. Engineering and Applied science are totally different things, in which he had no interest.
Columbia does have top notch math and physics departments. S thought the best physics lecture he listened to was at Columbia.</p>

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<p>jonri, my son entered Columbia College intending to major in Physics (or Political Science). As a first year, he would acknowledge that he really has no clue, but was drawn to the clear emphasis at Columbia College on all three of his general disciplines: science/math, social sciences and humanities. He had no interest in MIT, for example, because its focus is clearly math/science/engineering and economics.</p>