ABSTRACT

In the view of contemporary critics, the intellectual specialization represented by disciplinary study is the source of higher education's shortcomings–the academy's equivalent of original sin. The most common model of general education offers students experience in a number of fields across the disciplinary spectrum, but Stephen Toulmin's analysis shows why this approach is an unlikely vehicle for integrated learning. The limitations of general education as a solution to the problems of fragmentation and diminished community justify a new look at departments as centers of learning. Departments vary in character and strength, even on a single campus, and their roles differ in disparate institutions. Some liberal arts colleges, particularly where departments are small, discourage departmental identity in favor of an institutional one. By having students learn as faculty do, teaching one another through conversation, rereading, argument, and public writing, the course illustrates how scholarship works.