I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that's a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn't include "race, class and gender" among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on "cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion" during the age of the Bard.

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.

Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.

Why not take a course in “The Phallus”?

You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.

This is as much about education as about the very definition of knowledge and social cohesion. It underscores one of the issues that progressive educators often neglect, viz the images of education, the schooling process, and educatedness, prevalent in a given culture. The assumption that the result of education is knowledge (and skill and attitude and acceptable behavior and all that) is missing one important element. What education provides is above all primary socialization. That, however, is thought to be rather limited in scope because it refers to only basic communities. However, students need to be ‘primarily’ socialized into a number of groupings (secondary socialization would just be primary socialization into a non-immediate group - the process is similar). It could be described as learning to acquire ways of signaling membership. And one of the ways of signaling membership in a group/category of college graduates is knowing a little about Shakespeare. By little, I mean enough to have a mundane conversation. This may seem like a trivial matter but this signaling is absolutely crucial in the academic world (and at its intersection with the real world). The problem is that we need to affirm credibility of our sources of information. We basically have no way of verifying more than a tiny fraction of information that we need to base many decisions on. These signals our pretty much our only way of doing that (along with social connectivity). These new college courses (while often based on solid scholarship - no more woollyheaded than most tripe spouted about Shakespeare) neglect this aspect of education and run into trouble. The requirements for this social acceptability are fairly modest, though, as the highlighted section about shows. The author’s own knowledge of Plate would probably be shown woefully inadequate by any closer examination but a few mentions of the Republic of the cave in a conversation will establish her credentials as an educated person and therefore her credibility in certain kinds of social exchanges. (That is not to say that the same processes don’t operate within these ‘new’ kinds of courses, only they socialize their graduates into smaller more ‘exclusive’ groups.) The convener of Phalus 101 need not worry, though. Should the subject prove viable it will become part of the academic establishment. Many worthy disciplines (probably most) from mathematics to psychology have at some point or other been subjected to similar abuse and many are still fighting to gain acceptance.

The other questions, namely, what about the more general cognitive and affective outcomes of education. I suspect that they will be on average the same no matter what subject matter is the focus. The only thing that curricula and materials have any lasting effect on is encyclopedic (factual) knowledge. So if we start telling students that Pluto is not a planet and the capital of Kazakhstan is Astana, that’s what most of them will know (percentages of retention depending on how salient the need for the piece of information is and social and psychologically relevant it is). However, if we start telling them that drugs are bad, they will know that that’s what they were told but may or may not believe it or may or may not act on their knowledge and/or belief. Equally many students will remember that Plato had something to say about a cave with shadows in it but in relatively few will it lead to an ability to integrate it into their view of the world beyond the most trite late night musings. So, in short, despite being in favor of a lot of radical curriculum reform, I tend not to get too excited about these things any more.