BAUHAUS

I find myself to be largely supportive of the bauhaus approach to art education - an introduction to all foundation branches of art, and then working towards a specialization after considering all options. For not only is it a wonderful opportunity to be able to experiment with everything to be absolutely certain your specialization is the one you enjoy doing the most, each medium or category of art has its own approaches that the student will learn when taking those courses, and therefore be able to incorporate different angles of art into their work. By extension, I am also largely satisfied with the foundation program offered at Tyler: although foundation courses are tedious and highly demanding, it's wonderful to be offered a wide array of approaches and aspects of art before selecting and specializing. However, I am highly upset by the weak array of general education courses offered to satisfy our general education requirements at Tyler. I am a strong advocate of well-rounded education, and an equally strong advocate for not wasting my time and money. Having suffered through a rigorous academic program throughout my middle- and high-school years (IB program), I have already received a VERY well-rounded and meticulous education and feel as though the gen-ed classes offer me little to nothing (speaking in terms of attaining knowledge). For instance, I recently switched out of an "evolution and extinctions" class because the professor started talking about items like photosynthesis and general animal skeletal systems as an overview for things we would learn that semester. I have already passed through college-level classes in all of the core subject areas: math, science/biology, english, history...and now they're making me pay for knowledge I already have in order to obtain my degree?? There is something fundamentally wrong when your academic advisor tells you there is no way out of the gen-ed requirements, and that "at least it will be an easy 'A'".