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What happens in a major? Why do all colleges require them?
All majors play a similar role in undergraduate education. But a major has its limits. An undergraduate college major does not define a person’s character, personality, lifestyle, or career. There are important decisions in life: with whom to live, whether to have children, whether to work for a large corporation, for a small business (perhaps one’s own), or for some social or governmental institution. A college major is not in that league. It should be something that a student finds intriguing, engaging, and success-producing.
Sooner or later we all have to move from "acquiring" knowledge about as many subjects as possible – being a Renaissance person – to engaging actively in the problematics of focused issues. Such engagement is what happens in a major. Our students may enroll in a major as soon as they have satisfied prerequisites and are sure of their choices; this may be as late as the end of their second year. Majors provide opportunity for the following:
Honing the mind
: Intimacy with the assumptions, material, and methodologies of a specific area of study enables students to manipulate and question knowledge. Such mental exercise sharpens and broadens the mind and hence has intrinsic value. But it also opens the way to
Confronting fundamental questions about the human condition
: What are we as thinking, imagining, and feeling individuals, and as physical and social creatures? Different fields question in different contexts and use different languages and texts – different evidence. But all ask what being is, how human creatures fit into the universe. Physicists use mathematics as a language and their context is the universe. Their models for understanding the universe are just as much products of human imagination and intellect as are anthropologists' models of cultures, the psychologists’ models of the human mind, or the historians’ reconstruction of the past.
Becoming skeptical
: All majors try to shake students free from comfortable, unexamined assumptions about themselves and the world; they try to open students' eyes to new ways of understanding and to the complexity of issues and ideas. By working in a discipline students learn how to ask questions, how to search for answers, and how to be tolerant of partly knowing and not knowing, of approaching the truth (if there is one) but never arriving at it. At the same time, through a major, students learn to hypothesize and make decisions with incomplete evidence. Educated people have to be able to decide on a course of action; they can't just throw up their hands and say that "anything is acceptable, true, or possible because we can't really know anything anyway."
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