With this website, we aim to describe the program, how it works, and why we think it will be a valuable part of your education. We'll also provide information about the courses being offered and a sense of how those courses relate to one another. That's one of the distinctive features of our program: Not only do we offer you a menu of high-quality courses from which to choose, but we also ensure that those courses relate to one another in ways that produce an integrated learning experience.
AU's General Education Program consists of 150 courses arranged into five curricular areas. These curricular areas represent the best efforts of numerous scholars to divide human knowledge and intellectual activity into manageable pieces: The Creative Arts, Traditions That Shape The Western World, Global and Multicultural Perspectives, Social Institutions and Behavior, and The Natural Sciences. Students take two courses in each of the five curricular areas -- one foundation course and one second-level course in each curricular area, for a total of ten courses -- in order to complete the program.
All of the curricular areas contain puzzles and challenges that we feel all educated people should grapple with on their way to developing a firm and mature sense of themselves. In the end, this is what general education is all about: Helping you to find yourself by engaging in dialogue with great scholars, artists, poets, and philosophers. The General Education Program allows you to test your ideas against theirs and grapple with tricky ethical and political issues in the company of your classmates and under the guidance of a teacher whose main goal is to produce a space in which real learning can take place. You may discover a hidden aptitude for, or a love of, a subject area that you'd never considered before or learn to appreciate an area of human knowledge that you'd previously thought irrelevant. And through it all, you'll be finding out who you are.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that you should "become who you are." This strikes us as a neat, concise definition of what we are about in the General Education Program. To us, Nietzsche's admonition means both that you should find out who you are already and that you should become more intentional about crafting yourself along those lines, so that your decisions and actions reflect the person you most want to be. It is our feeling that the best way for you to learn how to do this is to engage in a deliberate effort to work through the implications of various positions, trying things out and seeing how they fit together. That's our overarching goal: To provide you with a solid foundation on which to build your career and, ultimately, your life as a generally educated person.
Dr. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson
Director, General Education Program
