Distribution hurts educational exploration

After graduating from Rice in May, I plan to enroll at my local community college to take freshman-level chemistry and Korean. I should have been able to take these courses from the wonderful professors at Rice.

Rice’s system of distribution courses needs to change. The current system hinders students’ natural desire to explore and prevents them from acquiring two valuable skills: multilingualism and the ability to integrate separate but related fields.

With grueling degree requirements and distribution demands, we have little room left for exploring nonmajor subjects we are actually interested in, unless they happen to be covered in required distribution courses.

Distribution hinders intellectual curiosity — any student who has taken a freshman-level distribution course instead of a more intriguing class recognizes this problem.

Furthermore, the system penalizes students who want to learn a new language. Students who speak only English are given an incentive to ignore foreign languages altogether, because they can more efficiently satisfy their Group I distribution requirement if they do not spend a year slaving over basic grammar in a 100-level language class that does not count toward distribution. The first year of learning a language can be difficult, tedious and discouraging. Such a plunge is neither valued nor rewarded by our distribution course system.

Instead, the system rewards students who take upper-level courses in languages they already know, focusing on literature or culture rather than on language skills. More value is placed on learning esoteric aspects of a known language than on acquiring basic communication skills in another. According to the General Announcements, the purpose of the distribution system is to broaden one’s knowledge; yet where foreign languages are concerned, a deepening of existing knowledge is encouraged at the expense of gaining new basic knowledge.

The distribution course system also penalizes a student who wants to explore other fields within his or her major’s distribution group. I regret that by being relatively ignorant of chemistry, biology, physics and engineering, I am also ignorant of many interesting applications of my mathematics major. But since my major requirements already satisfy my Group III requirements, I cannot justify taking a superfluous Group III distribution course when I have so many Group I and II distribution requirements to fulfill.

I enjoyed many of the courses I took solely for distribution credit, while other courses I merely endured. Learning about topics that I never would have without the compulsion of distribution course requirements has come at the expense of studying subjects I truly want and need to learn about.

The goal of broadening students’ knowledge can be better achieved by giving students some general guidelines and allowing all reasonably rigorous Rice courses to satisfy these guidelines.

Requiring a minimum number of courses to be taken outside the distribution group of one’s major — and perhaps a requirement that these courses come from several different disciplines — would be preferable to the prescription of exactly four courses in each narrowly defined distribution group. Changing the current formula would allow an engineer who develops a fascination with sociology to take distribution courses in the sociology department. Making every meaningful class a part of a distribution group could reward intellectual curiosity in a subject.

We should additionally require that students take courses not merely in the same distribution group as their major, but also in multiple departments within that group. Opening up disciplines that are currently impractical to explore would encourage students to discover important extensions, connections and applications of their majors. That linkage would ensure a truly broad education along with the potential for training in an academic specialty. Most Rice students are naturally inquisitive people. They can and should be trusted to choose courses that will broaden their knowledge and give them a well-rounded education. An improved set of requirements would transform distribution courses from another hoop to jump through into a wonderful opportunity to explore.

Megan Abadie is a Baker College senior.

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