With the completion of my team’s deliberation (Which couldn’t have gone better) it is now time to look back on my peer’s deliberations, or more notably the one I attended, which was a a deliberation on the role of college in today’s society. I chose to attend this deliberation due to both the fact that I am a college student, and naturally I want to get a return on my investment, and also that it seemed very interesting.
The way the deliberation team approached their topic was to split the role of college into three main categories. These three categories were knowledge, socializing, and career development. I have to say that these three approaches were the quintessential reasons people attend college, but due to the controversy of the differing opinions about this, I feel that the deliberation went in the wrong direction and could have been moderated better to stay on topic.
For instance, approach one went smoothly and as expected, but then the second and third topic melded together into a debate between career-oriented majors and passion-oriented majors. One example of this was the overall opinion of general education classes being a waste for career development. It turned into a debate over whether these should be required or removed. It even reached a point where one of the deliberaters (Just accept that fact I made a new word) called out another deliberater because of the differing opinions. The deliberation basically polarized everyone to either be all about career development or not about career development at all.
It even moved to the point where people began to simply express frustration over the way the system was set up. There was an almost 10 minute segment of the deliberation where the conversation turned to trying to decide if guidance counselors really care about their students. This came up after multiple students quoted their counselor’s on saying that the student “Will never get a job” with only their current intended major.
Now, I feel like I have been overly critical up to this point, but the deliberation did have a couple bright spots. For instance, we did come to the conclusion that Gen-eds are a little over emphasized, and that the school needs to make exceptions for people who already have their career goals and aspirations in sight. Furthermore however, we did decide that gen-ed’s are necessary evils for most, as they do expose students to subjects they could love, but simply don’t know it yet.
Another bright spot, for the most part, was the overall backgrounds of students who came. We had multiple foreign students, and people across all majors. It would have been nice for more non-RCL students to come, but it was understandable considering the deliberation was at 6 on a thursday, a night people traditionally are busy.
In retrospect, I have to say that while I enjoyed the deliberation, it really taught me what not to do with ours, and I feel that was reflected in our moderation. For example, before we personally started, we practiced for a few hours and stressed that any debate must be avoided at all costs. We did this quite well. By attending this other deliberation it also allowed me to be able to tell when conversations were going off track. I tried to moderate this in my deliberation by trying to make a comment that drew the conversation back to the topic, even if I was not in charge of the idea.
I agree with your conclusion about Gen-Eds. While there certainly are plenty of students that don’t know what their interests are and don’t know what field their future career lies in, plenty of students do know these things, and they should be able to focus on them. Is it better to make an engineer that excels in his field because he was able to dedicate his time to his classes in college, or is it better to make an engineer who has gaps in his engineering know-how filled with fitness-walking etiquette and some memorized facts about paintings? Although I understand the whole well-rounded argument, people that have to take difficult classes for their major are usually forced to take the Gen-Eds that are the easiest available and have the least work, meaning that one doesn’t really learn too much in these courses. Luckily, credits from my local community college are accepted here, so I’m planning to get most of my Gen-Ed requirements out of the way this summer.
Ben, I think it was a really good idea to go to your deliberation ahead of time to see what could be reflected in ours. From you’re saying, I think you did a really good job of not letting the bad parts of the deliberation you attended become integrated into our deliberation. I also agree that I think ours went well, and I hope you’ll be looking forward to reading about my experience with Jim in my next post.
That’s really cray and I’m so glad neither of our deliberations took that sort of turn. That kind of arguing is pointless and it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the event. But, at least there was something you could take out of it. The purpose of Gen-Eds to build a more well-rounded student is pretty controversial, but that’s why there’s technical versus liberal arts schools.