My GE Problem

 There are very few things quite as annoying as General Education classes. Too many of those classes are 3 or 4 units, and really, that’s excessive. It is fundamentally wrong to be required to take so many filler classes in lieu of additional electives directly related to one’s field of interest.

Credit: theinvisiblewombat

I, for one, am very reluctant to spend any of my precious time figuring out what the Arts and Humanities classes want from me. This means I usually get a B for those courses at the end of the quarter, which I totally deserve but also find to be astonishingly annoying. Yes, a B is a maddening thing, especially in a class I had to force myself to attend. You know, the kind of class you bribe yourself into attending, the kind of class that has you hoping you’ll get a heart attack or be struck by lightening; anything to make the professor’s vainglorious, insipid rant stop.

A lot of us work very hard in classes that matter to our major, and that is the primary thing that should be reflected in our GPAs. Performing at an average level in a GE class brings the whole grade point average down. And for what? For being justifiably unconcerned with the nuances of Feminist Media Production? I am pretty sure no employer in my field will ever care that I took twenty five million credits of Social Sciences, Humanities, and whatever else the Association of American Colleges and Universities has decided I should study, in addition to my major requirements. I’m not sure which miserly bunch of old-school, retired educators sat down one day and decided that GE should be replete with extraneous “stuff,” but I think I speak for many of us when I say I don’t like them.

On the other hand, taking a variety of classes is important for a well-rounded education –though “well-rounded” is quite a vague term. Still, I’ll admit that my GE provides a nice break from the intensity of my major. There are people out there who have no idea what drives protein folding in vivo, and that’s great, because it means I can talk about other things twice a week. Also, it’s good to remember that a GE class can be someone else’s major requirement, and it is absolutely not my intention to disrespect other majors. My only concern is that I am required to spend so much time not focusing on classes that directly sharpen my scientific skills. At the end of my day, “general education” still sounds a lot like “trivial education.”