A New Plan for Concentration

T HE familiar principles of distribution and concentration are the time-honored bases for determining students' programs in higher education. The distribution of students' courses among the fields of knowledge is vaguely utilized as a means of furthering their general education. Paradoxically enough, however, students complete their liberal training by the intensive study of one subject. Many faculties recently have allocated the first two years almost entirely to general education, and the last two almost completely to specialization. Until the widespread adoption of so-called survey, orientation, and overview courses, the principle of distribution was in fact a system of sampling by which students contacted mere fragments of the broad fields of knowledge. Departments taught most of these narrow courses actually, if not ostensibly, to prepare and persuade the students in them to undertake advanced courses in the department. The ultimate objective was to train students, as erudite scholars in embryo, in specific academic disciplines. Here and there instructors made a distinction between the needs of students pursuing a subject for general enlightenment and culture and those who might major in it. These cases were relatively infrequent, however; faculties fervently declared that what constituted good preparation for advanced study also served most effectively for general education. Organizing related departments into divisions and developing comprehensive courses on a field, rather than a departmental basis, were distinct steps in advance in general education. It is important to note, however, that these broad courses have been organized around two different conceptions of the nature of general education. The one point of view considers a general survey of the subject-matter of the field to be of paramount importance. This survey may cover each of the subjects in the division briefly and, to a considerable extent, separately, or it may neglect these arbitrary lines in the selection and organization of content. In either event, the formal sequence, the chronology, the characteristic forms of thought and methods of investigation, and the subject-matter content of the course are those of the academic discipline or disciplines involved. The purposes of instruction, furthermore, correspond in general to those of the

Distribution (mathematics · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · General education · Geography · Higher education · Library science · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Plan (archaeology · Political science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Computer Science · Evaluation of Teaching Practices · Innovations in Educational Methods · Law · Mathematics · Psychology

• Turning Points in a Scholarly Career

  T R Mcconnell•The Journal of Higher Education•1979

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