Until recently, I have had a history of lamenting Dartmouth’s distributive requirements. As someone who started out as a philosophy major on the pre-med track only to change to philosophy modified with economics one year later, I felt as if my education was broad enough, encompassing humanities, hard sciences and social sciences. I have studied everything from chemical bonds to Hicksian demand curves to Kant’s transcendental idealism. What could my education possibly lack?
Most notably, it lacked humility. If a main goal of a liberal arts education is to expand our horizons and gain perspective on the world, my course selection failed miserably. All of the courses I had enrolled in fell well within my comfort zone. And yet I continued to bemoan that I had many distributive requirements left.
So when I found a course that satisfied two requirements at once, I jumped at the opportunity. In fact, I signed up without having any idea what the course was about. I entered a women’s and gender studies course called Telling Stories for Social Change with the explicit goal of simply “knocking out two distribs.” What I learned ended up being one of the most valuable experiences I have had during my time at Dartmouth.
The course is one of the College’s few community-based learning courses. We split our time between the classroom and sessions at the Sullivan County Department of Corrections, where we worked with some male inmates to create a play to perform at the prison by the end of term. We aimed to create a space where the inmates could talk openly and their voices could be heard. We did not come to study their behaviors, to witness the prison system from within or to impose our own ideas about what we felt was best for their rehabilitation. Rather, we came to listen to what they had to say. Only after listening could we offer help in any meaningful way.
While I learned many immeasurably useful things from this class, perhaps the most valuable thing I learned was that despite all the privileges I have been afforded in life, I know very little about helping others. The people who need assistance understand what they need better than anyone else. And so rather than impose my ideas about the best way to rehabilitate an inmate, I began to listen to the inmates themselves. I learned that my role was not to save these people in some kind of patronizing way — it was much simpler than that. I respected their right to make their own decisions. My role was to listen and then act on what I had learned by removing obstacles where I could. My role was not to push the inmates into what I thought they should do.
Such a humbling and valuable learning experience would not have been a part of my education had I not been forced outside of my comfort zone with the distributive requirements. Foolishly, I had thought that my course selection had covered enough departments to make me a well-rounded student. After taking this class, I learned that becoming a well-rounded student means taking classes outside of the subjects where you already feel comfortable. One of the keys to being a well-rounded student is being a well-rounded person.
All of us have different areas where we feel out of place. Whether you are an English major who has never been in a science lab before or an engineering major who has never studied the artists of the Renaissance, you can benefit from exiting your comfort zone. The distributive requirements are there to push us outside our self-imposed boundaries, and I truly believe that the best learning often occurs outside of our familiar subjects.
So embrace the distributive requirements and take something way beyond your comfort zone. You might just gain a whole new understanding of something you never thought of before.
Jacob Kupferman '14 is a guest columnist.
