Environment and
the academic curriculum

I hope this plan is not implemented. If it is, the additional subject will result in overloading pupils and students as well as teachers, not to mention other additional expenses related to the offering of more subjects.

Climate change is of course considered an important phenomenon that must be known and appreciated by students and teachers alike so that they become prepared to help in minimizing its effects and even to adapt to it. But there should be other ways to integrate it in the curriculum without becoming another subject by itself. It can be part of the course on advanced environmental science or advanced ecology. It may be a subject of a term paper or a field research requirement for natural science or social science.

The point is that climate change, which cuts across several disciplines, can be handled in a number of innovative ways in order to become part of student learning. Because of the explosion of knowledge in recent decades, integrative approaches showing interrelations of knowledge in various academic areas should be preferred over creation of new subjects as part of the curriculum.

However, there are new developments in science that should be an integral component of learning in both basic and higher education. One of them concerns the science of genetics. Genetics must be taught as a full course that incorporates the modern advances in our understanding of genes as the units of inheritance and the theoretical and practical uses of this knowledge in biotechnology. Aside from use in developing technology, genetics provides the basic foundations for other important academic areas such as systematics, evolution, natural selection, speciation, etc. That is why genetics is a subject students cannot do without.

Another issue related to the topic at hand concerns the number of units a graduate student needs to complete for his master's or doctorate degree. It is of course necessary that a student takes a thorough grounding in the core or basic courses but opinions vary on which and how many courses are needed. Oftentimes the decision must be left to the judgment of student's adviser.

Still another related issue is the number of courses that a graduate student should take before he conducts the research for his thesis. I sometimes feel that graduate schools require too many courses so that they can realize income from tuition payments. The guiding rule is how many and what courses make a student competent in an academic field.

Some educators including some at the Commission on Higher Education favor granting of master's degrees without a thesis. This is not correct. These people have failed to understand that writing a thesis is an academic exercise in research needed by a student in his professional work after graduation aside from providing new knowledge in his field. Doing thesis research may be more intellectually fulfilling than many of the courses taken by a student.