COLUMN: Give us fewer 'Introduction's

From Carl Seaquist's, "Ahann Ahim," Fall '97 From Carl Seaquist's, "Ahann Ahim," Fall '97I came to Penn partly because of the city of Philadelphia, partly because of the University Museum (definitely the best part of campus) but mostly because Penn let me take the courses I wanted to take and ignore the rest. So for an artsy-fartsy-type like myself, anyone who took two years of calculus and a semester of chemistry or physics needed only one more math course and he had satisfied all of his general requirements. It was great. In other words, if I were born a year or two later I might never have come to Penn. I figured, when I was a freshman, that introductory courses were a waste of time -- at least in the humanities and social sciences. Math and the natural sciences worked differently. And I still think that, for the most part. As an undergraduate, anything you learned in an "Introduction to" course, you'd learn again in an upper-division course. So if you ever wanted to take that upper-level course, you might as well start with it. Otherwise you were just wasting your time as a freshman. Of course, that's assuming people can learn a subject after encountering it once. I now know there's an advantage to studying some things more than once: people sometimes need time to learn a new skill and often the best way to learn a skill (as opposed to, say, a bare fact) is to practice that skill, over and over. That caveat aside, I still believe introductory courses are generally not worth much. While working on my master's degree, I was a teaching assistant for a course called "Introduction to Philosophy" for a year. I worked for two different professors, who had very different syllabuses and teaching styles. Here, if anywhere, is a good subject to have a low-level "Introduction to" before delving into higher-level work. For my part, it wasn't until part way into my second year of my master's that I started to figure out the contours of the discipline, and it wasn't until two or three years later that I felt I had a good overview of it. But what are the options available to someone who is assigned to teach an introductory course in philosophy? He can go chronologically, telling his students about the major periods of philosophy and having them read snippets of different authors. But by its very nature, good philosophical arguments are almost impossible to summarize and reading a chapter from a work of philosophy feels very different from reading the whole book it comes from. This approach is dangerous. Another option is to break the discipline into perhaps three or four major subfields and give students a brief introduction to each of these. Both the professors I worked for operated this way. Let's say as a freshman you take a course like this and learn a little about ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and political philosophy. You love the course, drive your roommates crazy with talk about how we know this whole world isn't the dream of some higher being and then go on to become a Philosophy major. Next year you take logic (one of the best courses offered at a university, by the way), philosophy of mind and ethics. As a junior you take a course in political philosophy. What did your introductory course do? It was a big advertisement, nothing more. Everything you covered as a freshman came up a year or two later and probably bored you the second time through. After all, professors tend to shy away from difficult topics in introductory courses, so given you liked philosophy and went on, you probably learned everything in that first course the first time around. The final option is to devote lectures in an introductory course to telling your students how you see the field, what you like about it and generally trying to spread your interest to them like you'd spread a virus. Some professors are charismatic enough to have some success with this approach, but for most classes this approach is death. What's the solution then? First, assume students can read for fun and do things to encourage them to do so. Second, have professors give public lectures (not for credit, no attendance taken) that give general background information for people who are interested in the field and who want to do more study on their own. This is done simply enough by having professors translate lecture notes for "Introduction to" courses into self-contained, 90-minute public lectures. Then a lot of introductory courses can be cut from the rolls and undergraduates can get a lot more for their money.