Tuesday, June 06, 2006

"There are no biological differences whatsoever between men and women."

... or "American education is getting dumber".

First of all, a bit of a background.

Most colleges and universities in the US teach liberal arts. Liberal arts, as used in American higher education, is a term that usually groups together humanities, social studies and natural sciences (including math and occasionally computer science).

Colleges that teach liberal arts tend to have so-called distribution requirements, which typically means that if your major is in one of the three branches of liberal arts, you have to take some courses in both other branches as well. I don't really see a point in it, but it's no big deal. When I was in Boston University we had fairly typical distribution requirements: 6 courses outside one's branch, with at least 2 of them in each of the others.

Since I changed my majors a few times, and some were in humanities and some were in natural sciences, getting at least 4 courses of each was trivial. 2 social studies courses were quite a bit trickier. I did them in my senior year, when I already knew that you can get by with less work taking senior classes than taking freshman courses. I ended up taking the Sociology of Science, which turned out to be pretty much a course on epistemology, and a very interesting one at that, but had absolutely nothing to do with any sociology, at least as I imagined it. The other one was an introductory course on women's studies, which was not very hard and reasonably interesting. I enjoyed both but they did not ignite in me any desire to study any more social studies.

Anyway, we were talking about education with Sophia and Jenny yesterday (they have both just graduated from college, Sophia in biology and biochemistry and Jenny in mathematics) and it turned out that the things have changed a bit since my times: nowadays you have to take normal humanities and social studies classes for your distribution requirements, but in science they have special dumbed-down science-for-morons classes that humanities and social studies students can take for their distribution requirements, but science majors are not allowed to take for credit.

The finest moment of the higher education conversation came when Sophia remembered the women's studies class she took for the social studies requirement. The teacher started the class saying "There are no biological differences whatsoever between men and women". Being a biologist, Sophia wanted to correct her, but then she figured that if the teacher still does not know any differences while being in her fifties, it's better not to tell her, she might get upset or something.

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