Princeton students are brilliant.
This at least is what we are told, and since it benefits my ego, let's assume that it is true.
What we aren't — at least not always — is well-informed. To be fair, most of us know a lot about our respective fields of interest, and most of us even have understandings of certain esoteric subjects that go above and beyond the knowledge base of the average educated person, and yes, our education takes place in and out of the classroom.
Yet, it distresses me that in my time at Princeton I have met people who had never before heard of Marie Antoinette; the difference between a nation, a state and a nation-state; the Divine Comedy; and blackface — just to name a few. For my part, I know that there are probably a lot of significant concepts in the sciences that I ignore, and even in my own field of study, I didn't know a single thing about Japanese history (or Japan) before I started taking a course in it this semester.
Now the Japanese problem has been corrected, and before I graduate I'll have to take another ST, thereby enriching my knowledge of scientific things. Those who didn't know about Marie Antoinette have been spottily filled in. In turn, I have been given introductions to programming concepts essential to understanding my friends' conversations.
Still, I cannot help but feel uneasy. If IvyGate hadn't posted those infamous photographs, blackface might never have come up in the conversation. It would theoretically have been possible for a student to spend four years at Princeton and not understand the unfortunate history of blackface.
To some this may seem irrelevant; it is after all impossible to know everything. But consider the prospect of a student leaving Princeton never having read or seen a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare is such an integral part of the Western Canon that the prospect seems not only unlikely, but wrong.
Naturally, I have read Shakespeare — in high school. At Princeton I have avoided him. There has been nothing here to force me to read him, and if I had not already done so, I would be perfectly capable of leaving Princeton without ever having experienced Shakespeare.
Likewise it is possible (difficult, but possible) to leave Princeton without ever having taken a course on the general chronology of mankind, without any knowledge of calculus and without ever having taken a course on literature. Everyone knows about the ST gut courses and their QR counterparts. Those who find history unpalatable can also avoid taking history courses through the ambiguity of "Historical Analysis."
To defend having an HA requirement, rather than a history requirement, one need only to argue that the point of the distribution requirements is to force students, not only to navigate unfamiliar waters, but to teach them how to think in new ways. That is after all what the liberal arts education is all about, teaching one how to think.
Except, that there are things worth knowing, not only for their own sake, but also so that when we learn how to think critically, we have things about which to think. Perfect analytical logic is useless, or even potentially deadly, if one departs from erroneous premises. At best the poorly informed leaders of tomorrow may make fools of themselves at cocktail parties when they assume that Germany is a permanent member of the Security Council; at worst their ill-informed decisions may result in national tragedies.
I am not advocating for a core like Columbia's. The liberty afforded by the distribution requirements can be useful while the requirements themselves exist for a good reason. They do, however, require tweaking, and this tweaking ought to make strides in resolving not only the problems of unfortunate ignorance, but also additional problems of utility and equity. If my arguments have up until now been unconvincing, consider how many reviews on the Student Course Guide advocate taking a class merely because it is an easy way to get out of a distribution requirement — surely there is something wrong with a system which encourages students to expend minimal effort in a class of no interest to them. As to equity: I have heard many of quantitatively-inclined friends lament that it is much easier for a humanities/social-sciences person to weasel his or her way out of a difficult QR or ST than it is for science and math people to find easy HAs, though in that case I'm not quite sure who exactly is losing out.
If any readers think to see themselves presented here and take offense, please forgive me. I mean no harm. There are probably crucial things I don't know which would make you gasp with horror; it is that very problem which I would like to see remedied. Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a history major from New York, N.Y. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.
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