Respond (on the blog post) to the following 2 questions:

  1. What is a central tension Boyer discusses in his chapter? Support your response with a quote from Boyer and at least 4 sentences of explanation.

A central tension Boyer discusses in his chapter is that colleges and the professors and administration that work there have opposing views as to what a college education and majors should be. Some say that having highly specialized majors are what is necessary for students to have success after college. The opposing side argues that having a specialized major without any investigation into a broader spectrum sets the students up for being unable to fuse their highly specific knowledge with the greater discipline and how it connects to other aspects of different subjects. This closes off their mind to having very creative responses to problems that could have drawn from knowledge from a wider range of information. “This unhealthy separation between the liberla and useful arts, which the curriculum and the faculty too often enforce, tends to leave students poorly served and the college a weak and divided institution.”(Boyer 217). The fact that there is argument and controversy even within one university takes a toll on the education that students receive there, as depending on what professors they have, they could get conflicting ideas of what they should be learning, and become confused and frustrated as a result.

  1. What is Boyer’s “Enriched Major” idea, and how does he imagine it as a response to a key tension? Support your response with a quote and at least 3 sentences of explanation.

Boyer’s idea of an “enriched major” takes the best aspects from both a liberal and technical education style. This creates a type of education that encapsulates the most important things about a major that one cannot learn on the job, and why that major is important in the first place as well as how that major can relate to other disciplines. It also teaches the implications that their major could have on the world around them. This combination of both sides could resolve some of the high tension around which is better to teach in universities. “Through such a curriculum the student can move from depth to breadth as departments put the specialty in larger context.”(Boyer 223).