General Education

General education is a popular concept from the field of curriculum studies that holds commonly accepted connotations, but no uniform definition. Different from the terms core curriculum and liberal education, general education at both the secondary and postsecondary level has come to represent an organizational structure of curriculum design rather than a concept with specific ideological or content-specified meaning. General education is typically viewed as a component of the student's course of study, along with specialized education, and does not imply a fusion or integrated configuration of knowledge or a focus on fields of arts and sciences. In its most basic form, the general education component represents that fundamental knowledge that is assumed to be known by all students. From this root conception, general education has focused on common learnings as core knowledge, skills, experiences, traits of mind, realms of meaning, and modes of inquiry, as well as what has been interpreted and/or redefined as being nearly synonymous with experience-based, integrated curriculum and liberal education. General education curricula are typically developed at the postsecondary level and then translated—articulated—into secondary school curriculum.

Designing the general education component addresses one of the most fundamental curricular issues—what knowledge is of most worth—and causes administrators, teachers, and students to attend to matters of curricular breadth in relation to depth. Another fundamental curricular issue inherent in general education design pertains to curricular balance—namely, will the general education content provide experiences, knowledge, traits, and/or skills that cross the full range of an organized area of study? Attending to these design issues has led to four basic types of general education programs: (1) General education within separate subjects represents the most traditional type and consists of an array of courses fulfilling program requirements. This type of general education is often dismissed as patchwork education or as cafeteria-style general education. (2) General education as core curriculum focuses upon knowledge and establishes broad, overarching configurations of content from a few general educationoriented courses. (3) General education as learning traits views content as a venue to foster a series of specified traits and abilities that emerge from general education experiences and courses. (4) General education as modes or realms of inquiry is a more abstract conception of general education as engendering essential meanings and methods to learn and understand knowledge and experiences.

The origins of general education in the United States stem from curricular programs at Columbia [Page 400]University, University of Chicago, and Harvard University. At Columbia University in the 1920s, John Erskine's honors colloquium (serving as the guide to the St. John's Great Books program), the Contemporary Civilization courses, and the Humanities A and B courses led to one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated conceptions of general education with a well-developed balance of breadth versus depth and the introduction of a sense of program rather than the mere rearrangement of courses. The University of Chicago's New Plan of the 1930s is viewed as one of the best developed bureaucratic organizations with an innovative articulation between secondary and postsecondary schooling. General education at Harvard University was defined in the publication General Education in a Free Society (also known as The Redbook), published in 1945. Among its many refinements to the developing conception of general education, the Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society conceived of the Harvard program in terms of utility and the role of the general education program in the furthering of democracy. In fact, the Harvard Redbook served to influence greatly secondary school administrators to develop balanced, disciplinary-oriented general education programs rather than to develop the then emerging core curriculum programs.

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