Tensions and Models in General Education Planning

Discussions of general education have become a permanent fixture in American higher education, reflecting the perennial struggle between general education and specialization. The undergraduate curriculum, originally a unified, common, prescribed program in virtually all colleges, has been eroded in various historical periods by the rise of electives, the need for specialized programs, and the emergence of new knowledge. As these centrifugal forces strengthened, periodic counterattacks were mounted by those who wished to restore unity and coherence in the form of a resuscitated core curriculum or general education program (Rudolph, 1977). The battlefield of undergraduate education is strewn with the skeletons of well-meaning but unsuccessful reformers who attempted to stem the tide of specialization in defense of general education. The revival of interest in general education over the past two decades is in part a recognition that the forces of departmentalization and specialization continue in the ascendancy and are advancing virtually unopposed; this recognition is to the dismay of those for whom breadth is the essential foundation of an effective undergraduate education (Association of American Colleges, 1985).