No, historically it’s because universities have believed that the best way to attract students is to offer almost unlimited choice. They think (maybe correctly; I don’t know) that 17-year-olds will prefer a university that lets them tailor their own degree program.

I didn’t mean to demonise choice… I guess what I’m suggesting is that these two things, the meta-level skills and the “primer on recurring ideas”, should be covered off in an explicit and non-random way. In the choice students are offered currently, they may well pick up all of these skills and ideas – but the lack of an intent or a guiding hand makes it less likely.

Your points about content I agree with entirely. The issue of what goes into such a course would not be easy to resolve – but the alternative is not having any idea what the content is or could be. This makes it impossible to measure or manage anything about this dimension of learning, so it gets lost. Potentially the “meta-level” bucket would be less controversial to define than the “recurring ideas” bucket. The tension between prescription and innovation doesn’t worry me unduly, since the point of the goods is to enable creativity.

But I’m not sure choice is the big problem though or that we should be too worried about subject specific ‘goods’. I doubt an arts degree which gave greater emphasis to the canon but kept the possibility of students sailing through three years of tuition without ever having somebody critically engage with their writing and ideas would add that much value.

It’s the ‘meta level learning’ skills that are really important and will become more so as we adapt to having near instantaneous access to the assembled body of human knowledge (ie the internet). It’s not that socially or economically useful anymore for me be able to give someone a summary of the key points of The Republic (and write a 2000 word essay to train myself to do so). Wikipedia has destroyed the scarcity of that sort of knowledge. It IS useful for me to have a familiarity with what Plato was getting at, know where it ‘fits’, and know how to find the detail of the arguments when I need it and use it analytically to solve problems in different contexts. The problem with our current model is that it doesn’t teach people to be good at using knowledge to solve problems usefully. (The huge redundancy in universities’ collective intellectual output is a related topic for another day.)

But I don’t really care if a student develops those skills learning about film theory instead of basic microeconomics so I’m less fussed about being too restrictive on content. Subject mastery should come at the graduate degree stage. Plus being too prescriptive about what ‘the goods’ are is a really difficult practical task (I mean considering the politics of universities). And some of the classic arguments against canons are pretty good arguments. Saying that ‘certain ideas and principles must be better and more useful than others’ is fine but it doesn’t take you very far.

That said, I agree that there would be benefits to setting aside a significant chunk of a liberal arts degree (say at least 25%) to give people a primer on recurring ideas and themes within the humanities – liberalism, democracy, globalisation etc. But I wouldn’t bemoan choice. The best skill arguably a good university should inculcate is the ability to think creatively and innovatively. Surely you don’t get that by being too prescriptive about what people should know.

Personally I think the best system is to have the main part of the degree very specialised like that, and add a requirement to do a few courses chosen ad libitum from all over the place.

I really don’t think it’s more of the same. I think it’s the thing you’ve been complaining about only WORSE.