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We need more Latin lovers

In a speech given yesterday, a prominent lawyer advocated the merits of studying science before pursuing a legal career. However, it's not that science should be required, as much as it is that classes requiring critical thinking skills should be required. In effect, current university policy discourages students from taking the courses that are most important to their real education.

In the past, students learned critical thinking skills in Latin, or perhaps rhetoric or philosophy. Today's university system eschews these areas of thought for a much less-balanced curriculum. Correctly, most would point out that the skills taught in these classes have less applications in our more technologically advanced society. However, the most important aspect of these classes is that they taught critical-thinking skills.

Now the classes that teach high level critical-thinking skills are not Latin, but calculus, or physics or chemistry. Unfortunately, these skills are no longer required.

In most majors, it is possible, even common, to go through four years in that major without ever having to take a class that requires logic. For most colleges, passing College Algebra is enough to get a degree. Calculus courses can be taken, but they are considered to be electives. Who in the world would take what can be a very difficult mathematics class as an elective, when they could just as easily take underwater basket weaving for an "easy A?"

Even the way in which courses are presented stops students from considering them under the current system. Look at the description for a fairly-high level math course: Calculus and Differential Equations. Its description says that it features integral calculus with applications, techniques of integration, solving first order differential equations using separation of variables, introduction to autonomous first order differential equations. For the most part, these are exactly the sort of topics that students should be taking in order to develop higher level thinking skills that we all need.

University policy starts to get in the way of taking this course when we come to the section on prerequisites for the course: "The sequence MATH 250A-250B substitutes for the pair of courses MATH 129-254 or the pair MATH 129-355; however, MATH 250A alone does not substitute for MATH 129. P, score of 4 or 5 on the "AB" Advanced Placement Calculus Exam, consent of instructor. Credit allowed for only one of the following: MATH 250A or MATH 129."

Don't even try to understand it. I certainly don't.

A few years ago, the university initiated the general education system, which is absolutely a step in the right direction. It requires students to take science courses, but only at the most elementary levels. It is this that needs to be expanded. We should also require some form of higher-level course that requires critical thinking.

When the university decided that every student needed to have some acquaintance with cultures outside of the normal white male world, they added a new requirement. Now, everyone has to choose one class from a list of classes concerning non-European, non-male or non-white culture.

Similarly, there should be a requirement for critical thinking classes. Students could choose from a selection of calculus, geometry, rhetoric, physics, chemistry, bio-ethics, statistics, metaphysics; there a vast number of courses that could potentially satisfy this requirement.

All of these classes currently exist, but they have large numbers of prerequisites that scare off most students. Even if the stringent requirements for these classes don't scare off students, the idea that they are taking them as "electives," classes that they are ostensibly taking because they enjoy them, does.

In the end, this requirement would help people in every major. For many careers, knowledge of science or math is much more important than the skills normally associated with that career. Want to be an author? Don't be a creative writing major. If you graduate with a degree in that, you may know how to write, but you won't have the knowledge to write sensibly about anything. However, if a person has a degree in physics, or chemistry and can also write, they will have much more marketability on the job market.

Would students complain about this new system? Of course. But, in the end, this is a university. If a student wants to get through their college career without taking any courses that require higher level critical thinking skills, he should probably be going to ITT Tech. It is past time for the university to recognize that this isn't a trade school, and we should be held up to a higher standard.