Show SURVEY COURSES KEY TO OVERSPECIALIZATION The world is too smart for its own So great is society's body of knowledge that no man can hope to master much of For a man to try to learn all of it is like trying to level Everest with a For men to understand one they must have some things in common besides two a body and a stomach that keeps getting They need an intellectual meeting There so many different meeting grounds that people just don't have a common Joe Doakes has a civil engineering he is a specialist in small-town Max Mortey is the world's only authority on seventeenth-century military One day the two run into each just designing a new method of measuring basic oxygen demand in polluted It does away with the long test-tube fermenting Max is interested in what Joe has to He maximum time a soldier in Shakespeare's time could be put in the stocks for refusing to GI his barracks was 98 It was hell to be a soldier At this moment they are joined by J. Wilfred who never went to but who holds a mortgage on Fort He got their gears stripped this It looked Otis company would give them a The three look dumbly at each shrug their shoulders and walk off in different They have nothing to talk Their three fields of specialization are far from a pattern of well-rounded They are educated yet even a were taught little interrelated in a Free a volume called the Harvard says that many of the troubles in this democracy are caused by the lack of common It claims that this lack of a common body of knowledge was a result of high It recommended that schools adopt courses which cut across fields and The local committee on general education University of Utah has lagged behind many leading institutions in the development of comprehensive inter-departmental courses nor have we done very much in the direction of departmental courses of a type designed for general or non-major Present methods of group requirements give a student but these facts are not presented in any related and except to a too many facts taught are Sidney Hook in liberal arts colleges many particularly the are taught from the specialist's point of view to the detriment of broader understanding and abiding interest on the part of the most of if they become specialists will be specialists in something which means too much minor detail crammed into introductory What is needed are survey course cutting across departments and the elimination of The next of these articles will deal with the problem of organizing such a survey |