Rationale -- The Bucknell Student Body

CLA Document

The reactions the GEC received from its interviews with departments early in its deliberations were notable for the deficiencies faculty members identified in their students, despite an awareness of the many strengths of students that the Faculty reported. Over the course of time we have attempted to refine our assessment of the needs and strengths of students. We realize that we cannot generalize sensibly about all students, but there are clearly groups whose needs can and should be met better than they are now. Many faculty members characterize our students as, for example, lacking a general background of information that provides a historical, cultural, and geographic context for the study of their own society and the societies of others; lacking in analytical tools and the ability to reason; lacking initiative and motivation to learn or preferring passive forms of learning; lacking in basic skills, particularly study skills, writing skills, quantification skills, problem-solving skills, information-retrieval skills. At the same time, our students bring to Bucknell qualities that other institutions envy: a drive to succeed, a curiosity to understand, a desire to find meaning in the mass of particulars to which they are exposed in the classroom and daily life.

Dean Gerdes summed up this view of students and their fundamental needs in her letter to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of December 5, 1991:

I want our students to be able to get outside their own intuitive perspective–to recognize where they are situated in nature, in history, among the world's cultures, and in a pluralized American society; to view humanity and the world from the perspective of many disciplines and to apply the perspective of one discipline to another; to appreciate knowledge as developing and standing within particular disciplinary, historical, and cultural contexts; to read texts critically and to evaluate critically works, arguments, and evidence that a less sophisticated learner might simply accept; to appreciate creativity and to think and act creatively; to apply evaluation to opinions and values that they otherwise would have taken for granted; to be able to adopt the perspective of another culture or another time or even another species.

To realize these goals, any general education program must draw upon our students' strengths and present them with a curriculum in which the varied talents, perspectives, and instructional methods of our faculty can enable students to realize their potential.

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