By Trevor Hobler, Staff Columnist
I applied to Gettysburg College because I wanted a liberal arts education. I wanted to take various courses across different fields while getting a somewhat comprehensive and engaging experience. However, much to my chagrin, after two semesters of taking intro courses in several subjects, I encountered about one course that exceeded that of my high school education.
The counterargument is: that they are all introduction courses, and they are not meant to be incredibly in-depth or challenging. My issue is that it is nearly impossible to gauge one’s interest in a field with such mundane exposure. I have no doubt that a student majoring in any given subject will experience classes that challenge them and expose them to vast amounts of knowledge. However, this is not present in the classes that are prerequisites for those more advanced courses.
If you wanted to know what subject someone was going to pursue professionally, you would wait until they’ve received adequate exposure to enough advanced topics because students are likely to change their minds as they grow and dive into more challenging and exploratory aspects of higher-difficulty classes. A student taking calculus will have a much better understanding of what mathematics will be like as a field than one taking algebra.
Again, I want to say that I know that intro courses are designed to give an overview of a subject without overwhelming prospective students of that subject, but in order to actually give someone a real understanding of their interest in the field, they have to be challenged and forced to think critically. The workload of the intro courses that I have taken has all been heavy in tedious busy-work without critical thinking or challenges, without ever really pushing the critical thinking and challenging aspect of things. I want to tell if a subject is worthy of pursuit, but without taking classes that are difficult and exciting, I will have no idea, and in order to take those more exciting courses I need to take classes that require me to take these intro courses anyways.
The central pillar of a liberal arts education is holistic education. Even if you know exactly what field you want to go into, you still want the classes you are taking not to feel like a waste of time due to excessive monotony or lack of critical thinking. You want to be able to graduate and think that all the courses you took were in some way informative and beneficial to your education; after all, that is the whole point of attending a liberal arts college. The time spent in intro courses should be the time that makes you think about the world around you in new ways, but as it stands the 100-level courses mostly just make you feel like you are back in high school with non-stop busy work to keep you occupied.
If the intro-level courses were made more difficult, students would be pushed toward topics and concepts that they otherwise would not be exposed to. In turn, more challenging introductory courses would enable students to more effectively gauge their interest in any given subject without the need to spend multiple semesters getting to the more advanced classes. As it stands now a student that thinks they know what subject they want to pursue will have to take multiple prerequisites before they are able to confirm that desire by taking a legitimately engaging course. At the end of my first year, only four of the eight classes I have taken added depth to my understanding of the subjects, while the rest have just been largely reviews of courses I took in high school. None of the easy intro courses I took were helpful in informing me about what I want to pursue, and the time spent doing their busy work has not left me feeling extremely fulfilled. If the college does not make the introduction courses more difficult, they should at least make it easier and more accessible to take higher-level classes without needing the introductory counterparts. These prerequisites often stifle interest in fields, rather than fostering it like they’re supposed to.
