Are You Educationally Balanced?

Whether you are in grammar school, high school, or college, balance is a word that is essential to your being. The foods you eat, the physical activities you engage in, or even the subjects you learn require a sense of balance for you to get the most out of life. You consistently hear about foods, sports, and lifestyles, but when does a balanced approach to learning ever come up? 

College is where students find the culmination of so many academic pursuits. One can dive into the subjects that inspire many to continue their learning. These “more interesting classes” must also be supplemented with general education subjects to create a comprehensive knowledge base. These include courses that align with your main interests or courses from the spectrum of offerings at most schools.

These general education requirements are diverse. They span offerings from foreign languages, history, political science, English, psychology, philosophy, math, and sciences, to name but a few. Diversity of subject matter is essential to validate initial college degrees, where achieving masters and doctorates are focused on the specific subject matter. I should have prefaced the preceding sentence with “in theory” since “diversity of subjects” seems to have changed.

Over time, math and science courses are less encouraged by substituting other subjects to fulfill the specific requirement. There was a movement to remove the math requirement entirely should the student be declared “incapable” of learning the subject. After decades of teaching this subject, I can honestly say that of 100 who claim the subject impossible, maybe five have a genuine concern – but should this have been determined earlier in their learning, I am sure that even five would be too high.

The problems currently exist because those who create the rules seem to think that math/science is too hard. So, liberal arts classes are far more numerous than those from math/science, and many majors marginalize these subjects. By doing so, it misses the goal of a diversity of learning to achieve a degree. But students still get the degrees. Only the geeks in the math and science world still have to take gobs of English, history, philosophy and psychology, etc. (along with math and varied sciences), but the reverse is rarely true.

Fifty years ago, almost everyone took many more math/science courses than required today. Most everyone understood material from classes in both liberal arts and math/science. Today the balance is gone. But when searching for a job, think of what opportunities could have presented themselves should the balance between liberal arts and math/science still exist.

By overcoming fears in these more difficult subjects, you can build the skills necessary to succeed in many fields. Who knows how far you can achieve in any subject unless you gave it a chance? EXCL in Education was created for this very reason. By searching for the best instructor who is famous for communicating the most challenging material in the most straightforward ways, success can come to those who never thought they could succeed. If you just assumed it was too hard, how would you ever know?