So, for mental health reasons, I never got a degree from college despite having completed the requirements for a double major in political science in history and earning thirteen more credits than I needed to graduate. The reason I am officially a droopout is I am missing two language and two math classes. There are legitimate questions, now, as to who should or should not go to college arising in the public discourse. I think trade schools should be designed more like colleges, to extended them out to four years, and have similiar campus archetecture and activities. That so there is nothing but the content of the classes which seperate them from their more academic counterparts thus eliminating subconscious classism to the degree possible.
However, I went to a four year, liberal arts college for longer than four years and can honestly say the average student graduated with a middle-school education and high school worldview. The core requirement system failed me, miserably. My biggest problem with it is that, however, it does not produce the worldly, cultured, and well-informed people it is supposed to. Yeah, I was never going to use the high-level math and foreign language that I didn’t manage to pass but I am significantly more educated, worldly, and cultured than the rest of them. I got a more rounded and cultured education while not taking all of those classes and they got less of a rounded and worldly education despite passing them all.
One way I would reform the system is make the normal core requirements incentivized but optional. You may have to take two cultural classes for every one language class but, ultimately, not taking one class that is not in one’s major should not bar one from graduation. Instead, the students need to be forced to pay attention to current events and that’s not just political but everything that happens is intersectional and if that intersectionality is emphasized then they get the cultured worldiness of a liberal arts education. Instead of having all core requirements in the first two years, there is a general education class one is required to take every semster that does intersectional current affairs.
As far as the mental health side, I failed a lot of classes, some of which I got removed from my record. That said, someone who comes back to school many years later should not have to be brought down by a former bad spell in their life. I used to be of the opinion that grades should be abolished and I have not totally abandoned that idea but as an intermediate step, I believe having a statute of limitations on Fs should exist. Not Ds because if someone gets a D they are trying, if someone gets an F, someone probably when extremely wrong in their life, and Ds are not that difficult to recover from. That said, Ds should retroactively be inflated by a third of a grade one time if one has a sememster with an over 3.5GPA.
The next change I would introduce would be to abolish fraternities and sororities and intercollegiate sports. They make school less academic and more drunk and rapey and there is such a thing as semi-pro sports. The collage age athletes can just apply to a semi-pro team. they don’t need to be on campus. In the end, the partiers don’t learn their subjects, they learn aderall and essay mills.
In the end, a modern liberal arts education is not based on what psychologically makes more rounded people but on what should, in theory, do that but doesn’t. Taking classes in core requirement subjects, as they’re currently deaigned, produces people who don’t know what Lucy or the Higgs Boson are, can’t name the three branches of government, have never heard of Michel Foucault, have never heard of Maynard Keyenes, and have never heard of the Revolutions of 1848.
The Autistic Resistance 