In other words, if scientists do not want to teach Gen Ed courses, Gen Ed want to teach Gen Ed courses, Gen Ed them acceptable to scientists. "In the great search for manpower," Gerald Holton, the physics professor who teaches Nat Sci 120, said "everything becomes equal to everything else."

The Bruner committee, recommended that lower-level Nat Sci courses be added in such fields as chemistry, geology, astronomy, and experimental psychology. It also devoted some time to explaning the difference between a Gen Ed course and an introductory departmental course, a distinction which has become more or less academic, at least in those fields where the two are combined.

Justification

To justify these recommendations, the Bruner Committee contended students should learn some science--some facts about the physical world--not as a means of learning "method" but also for the sake of learning some facts about the physical world. Which particular facts a student learned concerned the Committee little if at all. The Bruner Committee did concede the importance of familiarizing students with the Redbook's "scientific enterprise," but insisted that the way to do this was simply to teach science. Knowledge about the "enterprise," however, is precisely what the Redbcook.

Knowledge about the "enterprise" however, is precisely what the Redbook had called "the major iam of the course,"--and it had insisted that the actual science taught was to be" chosen to subserve those aims.

Now, according to the Bruner Committee, this knowledge was to be picked up automatically by spending three hours a week for a year in a lecture hall presided over by someone holding an appointment in one of the science departments.

But even if an appreciation of the enterprise of science can be acquired by such a process of academic osmosis, some people argue that not all sciences are necessarily equally good vehicles for it. And since the 1959 publication of the Bruner report there have been many reactions against its assertion that the ideal Nat Sci course bore a surprising resemblance to whatever courses science departments happened to feel like offering.

Most eloquent of these is that of Mary I. Bunting. She has suggested that the ideal science for general education purposes is microbiology, since, in this field, it is possible to pick up enough background in one course, supposedly, to understand the problems which researchers are currently studying.

The Redbook Committee had wanted to give students some idea of the processes by which scientific discoveries were made by showing how these things had been done in the past. This ideal was rejected by the Bruner Committee, which was far more interested in the content of the solutions and discoveries. But by directing the attention of students to unsolved problems, Mrs. Bunting hopes to accomplish the goal of the Redbook Committee, at least in part, with a course which could not be attacked as historical rather than scientific.

Redbook Accepted

All of these arguments over the administration of the General Education Program accept the general viewpoint of the Redbook--that a student should take General Education courses because they teach him something he ought to know. There is, however, a justification for the Program which does not depend at all on the material taught being essential to some sort of generally educated man. Most of those who take this view are dismayed by the greater and greater specialization among undergraduates, however helpful such early specialization may be to those who wish to get an early start on their doctorates, intense specialization also puts heavy pressure on undergraduates to commit themselves prematurely to a narrow area of study, and it can be argued that an undergraduate education deep and narrow is not the best preparation for the student who plans to make his career someplace outside the academy. It has even been argured that the future academician should have an undergraduate education which is something other than a preview of what he will get in graduate school, as much as should the future doctor, lawyer, or businessman.

These critics see the general education program as the last bulwark sep- erating the College from being the first four years of the GSAS. They share the vision of the Redbook committee that the upper-level general education courses would offer support, encouragement, and staffing to interesting courses, experimental courses, which were not specialized enough to interest any single department. Where these critics differ from the Redbook committee is in their vision of the required lower-level courses as an opportunity to offer all this, plus a captive audience.

The committee which wrote the Redbook was unashamedly envious of the power the departments had to prescribe the programs of those who fell into their clutches. "The several departments," it said, "ordinarily have definite ideas of what is to be included within the immediate scope of their interest. They make rigorous demands upon the student's activities and time; and in the absence of virtually all definition of content in general educaeson, concentration inevitably dominates the curriculum."

The solution it adopted was to give general education the same coercive machinery a department enjoyed. "The claims of general education should be presented as clearly as the various departments press the claims of each of the fields of special learning," it maintained, "and to this end we shall recommend not only the adoption of certain requirements which the student must satisfy, but also that an agency be established within the faculty which will guard the interests of general education as the individual departments at present guard those of special education."

Competing Programs