Should colleges mandate all students take a general course about climate, food, and energy?

Sounds like an excellent idea to me.

 

maybe highschool? kids now required to take finances class prior to graduation.
if they had required it before, perhaps we could avoid 2008 crisis.

 

No. I agree high school.

It's bad enough that US colleges force students to pay for courses not directly related to their major or their future career. The only way they should have to take a general course is if it's paid for from general taxation.

 

Why not? Make it a law. We need more laws. There aren't enough laws.

Here's a law:

California governor signs bill requiring schools to teach gay history - CNN

 

With the price of college today, god I am glad I went in the 70's, you don't have time for required courses on subjects that should have already been pounded into your head in grades K thru the end of high school.

 

Silly me, I didn't think it was the college kids that got the nation into trouble. Didn't congress create fanny and freddy and allow companies too big to fail to trade in derivitives of mortgages?

How about keeping the federal government out of setting the curiculum. If universities have requirements to make more well rounded students that is a good thing.

Wouldn't it be better to let the universities choose their own requirements then you to impose them. Or do you have some credentials in the field. One course that covers all of that is going to cover it quite shallowly. Most of the smaller institutions do not have professors that would wish to lecture for it. Making it a global requirement will not stregthen universities, and their are plenty of students taking the course work in great depth.

Did they even have an enviornment in the 70s A much higher percentage of people go to college now and educating them all is difficult.

 

I am certainly sympathetic to the significance of this subject area. However, mandating things can always become a slippery slope. Can open the door for some other group who feels that their topic of choice is also critical to Humanity. politics, economics and psychology all come to mind.

AG raises the good point that I'll paraphrase. Perhaps re-interpret completely. ANY college course can be good (ie have an impact on students and cause them to further critical reasoning skills) if it is well taught. ANY course can be forgettable and, well, useless if it is poorly taught.

So, it depends on the teaching roster. Also we bear in mind that at many universities, the best&brightest among professors are tenured (low-level deities) and they teach what they want to teach. Not implying that the young faculty are never up to the task, but for large-enrollment intro courses, they typically constitute the roster.

Colleges differ in more ways than size. The course proposed here is going to be taught very differently at Stanford, Evergreen College (Olympia WA - archetype 'lefty' college with no grades), and Oral Roberts U in Tulsa.

Now I just picked those three out of a hat, so If I didn't get around to casting aspersions on your Alma Mater, don't get bent.

PS: next month I will actually teach this (all in one evening ) to 25 grad students from various Asian countries. You can imagine the type of hogwash they'll be subjected to! But seriously, I intend to conductit as mostly a group discussion, because the students come from different places, with different perspectives on this 'current debate". Each may face a different set of challenges during their academic careers back home. Or maybe their climates will turn out great. It could happen y'know. To the extent we discuss paleodata, current evidence (of changes good and bad) and future projections, I'll try my best to be objective, not all gloomy-doomy.

 

Re: Should colleges mandate all students take a general course about climate, food, and energy?

Gee I do not know.
I'm not sure that I want my beloved government mandating courses for private colleges. Sounds awfully close to indoctrination to me, leaving aside the political aspects of climate change, vegetarianism, and energy policy.
We've been down that road with religion. That didn’t work out so well IIRC.
Nice idea, but that slope can get steep and slippery.

You can make it a block to check in some Poli-Sci curriculum, but clamping students into a chair, forcing their eyes open and making them watch "Earth in the Balance" or "An Inconvenient Truth" sounds a little off to my left.

Sorry.

 

I certainly don't think that high endowments from successful alumni that help support scholarships and research is an inditement of an educational system. Well that is unless your pov is a mao style cultural revolution because money and intellectual thought are bad.

I'm not even quite sure what your course would entail or what department(s) would supply the faculty. Certainly an institution like Harvard could implement the course work, and do it well, but would not require it of graduate students. The whole idea of some guy in California dictating the curriculum for world class private institutions just seems wrong to me. It certainly would hurt many students just trying to get their undergraduate degree. Is the curriculum the same for the student getting a degree in film, as the one in public policy, as a student in nursing, in engineering? Are statistics, economics, and biology prerequisites? Do you close down the schools that can't teach it? Then make those close to graduating listen to boring lectures by anyone the institution can drag in to teach it? Maybe you should first try to get your idea implemented in the UC system where you pay taxes, before you attempt to force it on every university in the country. I am interested in your correspondence with the board of regents
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/contact.html

+1

I was thinking facist, but ... I can hear singing in the rain:rockon:

 

Agreed, seems like a good idea. I didn't have to take much in the way of humanities since I was in the engineering school and had to take one English class. I learned zip about energy, the world's oil supply, climate change, etc. when in college. None of these was a "hot topic" in the media, at the time.

The calculus classes I had to take were useless to me in my work and later in life. I had to go through a series of six classes (same series is required of all engineering, math and physics majors) + at least one either.

Yep. I hardly got anything resembling personal finances in school other than a "Project Banking" program in elementary school where we had fake checkbook and learned how to write checks and balance our checkbooks. That helped as one of my friends from college (about my age) didn't know much about writing checks once we started working.

 

...fine idea, but to be fair, what I was wondering, do we need two teachers? One from the left and one from the right?

In high school english, I did a research paper on global warming (greenhouse effect). This was long ago. I said we'd be flooded out by now. So it gives one some perspective too, to have given these matters some initial thought, and watch the issues develop over the years.

 

The title will likely tell you the point of view, but most freshman courses aren't left wing right wing. They may need two professors since the topics are multidisciplinary.

The one at ut that would satisfy is environmentally leaning but talks about the media and politics of it in discussion sections.
ugs303: sustaining a planet

That above course is an elective but it would have told you how unlikely that was to be flooded by now, because of greenhouse gases. I believe the term in slacker, the indy movie that followed some ranters, was we will be flooded in 20 years and that was released 20 years ago.

These things should be elective. That coures can get viewed and watched at high speeds on webcast, to skip over the boring stuff. The material can't be too dificult since the level of science is low for a big group of incoming freshman. They do have the possibiliity to learn about climate change and how it releates to sustanable agriculture, housing, manufacturing, and crops, and energy. One in the series is about al jazeera and how it affects public opinion in the arab world and outside, is what I would have taken.

 

It's one thing to say that it's good for people to be well-rounded, but it's another thing to blackmail them into paying for it.

 

I disagree with the OP's premise.

First of all,

That sounds very elitist. (Sounds like the "Wiz Kids" of the Kennedy administration that got us into the Vietnam War.)

I seriously doubt either the OP or anyone else on this forum has taken such a course, yet we've each have formed an opinion on global warming. Did we need a formal course on the environment for us to come to our conclusions?

Even now, there is a lot of opposing thoughts as to the extent, or even the very existence of global warming. A formal course in that subject wouldn't clarify things. Depending on the school that offers such a course, you'd find a diverse objective; e.g., a conservative, southern school would lean towards the lack of a greenhouse effect, while a northeast liberal school would skew towards it.

 

yes silly you; if everyone who got themselves into those buydown/0% down/low intro rate mortgage holes had a little bit of financial 101 and looked what they are getting themselves into, we wouldn't have nearly as many bad mortgages to trade to start with.

You can blame Wall-street greed, 1999 deregulations all you want, but at the end it were the buyers who put their money /and private parts/ into garbage disposal.

 

hey it is your choice: don't wanna don't go to college. We already have a bunch of classes which not needed like calculus for dental hygienists or literature, and not many complain about it.