Curriculum Changes — Back to Basics
Posted on Nov. 6, 1982From the University Report (published by the GAA 1970-94)
La de quien yea ya en el preSente el pasado y en el pasado lo porvenir.
That of one who already sees the past in the present and the future in the past.
Las Nubes — Jose Martinez Ruiz (Azorin)
From the Spanish writer Jose Martinez Ruiz (Azorin), I first read this quote in Spanish 21 during my freshman year at Chapel Hill. Taught by a fascinating graduate student, the Spanish literature course was refreshing and enlightening. However, had I come to the University just four years later, I might have missed both Azorin and Spanish literature because in the fall of 1970 the foreign language requirement was relaxed for undergraduate students.
As you have read in your recent alumni publications, the University at Chapel Hill this fall reinstated not only the foreign language requirements but most of the required courses that were removed in 1970. Having graduated just before the last curriculum change, I have many thoughts regarding this recent decision to return to the pre-1970 requirements.
The 1960s was a decade of excitement and stress and nowhere was this more apparent than on our college campuses. Many students expressed outrage that they or their contemporaries could be sent to fight, and perhaps die, in Vietnam, in a war in which many did not believe. Young people felt they were expected to abide by a variety of decisions made “for” them and not “by” them.
Here at Chapel Hill, largely in response to these dynamics, students, faculty, and administrators responded — perhaps precipitously — by initiating significant curriculum changes. Pass-fail grading in some courses began then. Course requirements were greatly relaxed, or eliminated altogether. Two semesters Modern Civilization no longer were required, and the requirements in mathematics, foreign languages and the sciences were greatly reduced. The required number of English courses was also reduced. All this triggered “grade inflation” and overconcentration in one’s major with a resulting diminishment of the traditional liberal arts education.
Since high schools usually reflect changes in college curriculum, it is not surprising that the North Carolina Commission on Science and Mathematics Education found that in the last decade the number of secondary teachers graduated in sciences and math declined by 30 percent and 55 percent respectively. Further, last year the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that a majority of high school juniors and seniors are deficient in their ability to understand what they read. Of course, we are all too familiar with the continuing concern about students’ ability to write.
If we are to avoid technological illiteracy and provide students’ with basic survival skills for life, the curriculum changes begun this fall in Chapel Hill are essential. Math, science, language, fine arts, history, English composition, and philosophy will better prepare students to compete in a world that is growing both more complex and more interdependent.
(To interject a personal note, I was fortunate as a youngster to live in Germany for two and one half years, exposed to another language in the classroom and in day-ta-day life. I believe from my own experience that such exposure to a foreign culture and language can be all-important in broadening one’s perspective.)
One sobering reality of today’s economic crisis is that we are increasingly involved with — and vulnerable to — the consequences of international economic situations and pressures. As just one example, the automobile industry is no longer the sole province of the United States. We are now competitors in a world market where the big three are Japan, Western Europe and the US — no longer GM, Ford and Chrysler.
To understand the culture, the values, the history and the language of other nations has become not a luxury but an essential survival skill for effective economic competition in the late 20th century.
Of course, an additional language has evolved — the one associated with computers and other recent technological advances, and reflected in the explosion of new technology we see around us in video games and recorders and home computers. An article in the Alumni Review (April 1982) described the exciting new computer curriculum on our campus.
The 1982 curriculum will have an important byproduct in that it sends a definite message to high schools preparing our future UNC students. These schools are aware that if their students are to compete for admission they must be prepared across the disciplines. Chapel Hill, traditionally known for its excellence in research and teaching, can be seen again providing the leadership to prepare students who will better meet the needs of a technological and international environment.
Finally, the new curriculum. in again providing more structure for a broadened undergraduate education, assures that more students will again experience the joy of learning for learning’s sake. We know all too well about the competition that exists for jobs today, but we also know there is more to life than work. Employers who understand this increasingly recruit individuals who not only possess technical knowledge and skills, but also those with a broader perspective and understanding of the arts, history and other languages and cultures.
I still recall the excitement I found as a student in the course work outside my discipline, which I took as required subjects, not electives. My perspective broadened as I grew to see the relationships among courses, and I learned to appreciate the complexity as well as the simplicity of the world around me, along with the history that had preceded me, and the challenges and unanswered questions that lay ahead. Perhaps the curriculum reform of 1970 should not have taken place? Fortunately, as Azorin said, “I am one who already sees the past in the present and the future in the past.”
Yours at Carolina,
Douglas S. Dibbert ’70
