While saying goodbye to the important adults in my life before heading off to college, the majority of them began to rave about their college years. You know the clichés. "Oh, those are the BEST years of your life!" "I wish I could go back." Blah blah blah. A large portion of these adults are teachers, and so they were mostly concerned with talking to me about what my classes and what I might be interested in majoring in. The most popular topic in any of these conversations, however, was choice. Apparently, in college, you have complete autonomy over which courses you take, what you end up majoring in, etc. I registered for my spring semester class this morning, and I'd beg to differ. First of all, prerequisites make everything more difficult. I understand entirely why they exists; you need to fully versed in one subject before you begin to apply it to more complicated topics.
Anyway, I want to try out some environmental studies classes. I looked through the lists of these classes, getting even more excited as I scrolled down. They look like such interesting classes. Only then did I realize that they all had prerequisites. Now, here I am, registered for Intro Bio, something I would never have signed up for otherwise. I'm not saying it won't be interesting, I'm sure it will, but in this situation, I was definitely not awarded all of the autonomy that I was promised. As I go through college, more choices will open up to me I'm sure, but for now I'm stuck with a very limited list to choose from. (Doesn't this sound familiar? House of Danger, anyone?) And even if prerequisites didn't exist, I am still left with only the Hamilton course catalogue to choose from. This feels like a childish form of autonomy.
Then comes the manipulation. Somehow my parents, friends, and even the societal views of what is a "useful" major got involved in my course selection. I'm aware that this isn't a good way to look at registration, but it's hard to avoid. My mom doesn't think that a sociology major is "useful," and she has decided that my mind is made for the sciences. At first, that cut down my choices even more. I took all english or comp lit classes off of my list. I even though about taking the sociology class off too. When I thought about how bummed I was to be missing out on that class, I realized that I was going about this all wrong. I should take the classes I am excited about and interested in. Not necessarily the ones that will have the biggest "payoff," whatever that may mean. So, mom, I'm taking bio and sociology. Yay for liberal arts.
I was talking to my friend last night, and he described schooling as the accumulation of information not pertinent to your future job, through which you can, at best, increase your intelligence somewhat. I responded, "Are there not classes which increase your wisdom?" And he retorted, "I'm not able to take the types of classes you are." We both go to Hamilton. Yet, clearly, we have both been manipulated differently: we have a different sense of our options, and different valuations of the same options. I think our dialogue speaks to the difficulty of identifying the pressures which limit our autonomy.
ReplyDeleteAs I was registering for my classes this past week I too found myself thinking about this exact idea. We are at a liberal arts college, so shouldn’t we be branching out and taking classes that interest us, even if they don’t have any practical applications? With that being said, how is it that this past semester I have been in Bio 101, Calc 2, Spanish 130 and an English class? No part of that seems different from what I was “required” to take in high school. However, we do need to these classes to get to the subjects that interest us. The only problem is, we are using the years we are supposed to be exploring, to get to the classes we want to explore…
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