Volume CXXXIII, Number 16 February 15, 2002 f

A need for practical classes

It's not new or uncommon to complain about limited course offerings. Every student and faculty member will give a different reason about why the curriculum is flawed.

The complaint in this short discussion is that too many Bowdoin classes are simply not useful. Students have been complaining about the un-usefulness of classes for quite a while, as far back as the 1800s, when colleges only offered a prescribed classical education, and students were tired of learning ancient languages and literatures. Now we're tired of classes that teach us how to theorize but never how to do.

The increasingly popular software training classes offered by CIS offer something that Bowdoin classes rarely offer: practicality. Even though they're short, one-time courses, they're a welcome addition to a curriculum that not only de-emphasizes practicality but generally derides it and fears it as well.

Other than the CIS classes, the only place to formally learn useful, practical things tends to be outside of the classroom. Students can get a hands-on, practical education at Bowdoin, but this occurs almost exclusively in student employment or student activities-such as the Orient, Masque and Gown, WBOR, BCN, and so on.

Perhaps this is the way many want it to be, but then we must ask, why?
Bowdoin is a trade school as any other, and we do learn a technology: we learn the mechanical trades of academic research and discourse. We learn the rules of the academic game, and then we apply them; once we get good at the game, it often requires little thought, effort, or challenge. Many of our classes are so geared toward the technology of the academic profession (i.e. how to write as a sociologist, how to think as an economist, how to write a grant proposal as a biologist) that they prepare us for little more than graduate school.

There are a number of practical classes offered now, mostly in the education, art, music, and theater departments. And practical classes have been offered in various other disciplines from time to time-a look at old College Catalogues shows courses such as electronic film production, public speaking, and technical theater.

Being liberally educated is a good thing, and we don't propose that Bowdoin offer degrees in business or journalism or communications. However, it would greatly benefit us to have a few practical classes in these and other areas that would teach us things that we might actually remember and be able to use somewhere other than in the classroom.

-NJL