Blogger's Response:
"According to the school newspaper, The Hatchet, history department faculty decided the change would be a way to recruit new students "to better reflect a globalizing world." 1
1 "GWU Lifts U.S. History Course Requirement For History Majors". 2016. Fox News Insider. Accessed January 7 2017. http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/12/26/george-washington-university-lifts-american-history-requirement-history-majors.
As far as I am concerned, this quoted passage cited above is the nut graf as the motive for the decision made.
Students of universities should be permitted to choose for themselves the worldview they would adopt regarding the history they'd like to specialized in -- after having already graduated.
While in school, they need to take all the courses needed to grasp all the history available at their schools of choice.
A certain pastor on television told an anecdote of having tried out for his high school's basketball team.
The coach began training him and all other tryouts by having them run long laps.
The tryouts had doubts that the basketball coach knew what he was doing by ordering them to run all these laps over and over for the first entire week of tryout.
The coach noticed that they were questioning his reasoning for ordering what seemed more like field and track activity being applied to training basketball tryouts.
The next time they all met together, the coach assembled them to hear him out explain why the frequent long laps being required of them if they were after all trying out not for field and track but for basketball.
He explained that they need to amplify their lung capacity to withstand the strenuous demands that this sport demanded of its athletes.
He added that with the lung capacity they had at the beginning of training, they'd never make it on the team because of exhaustion. Their staying power on the basketball court required that they enjoy the benefits of greatly amplified lung capacity for support.
If you wonder why I'm responding to an article about history courses, with an anecdote of high school tryouts being trained with running laps, I can only say that a major university had required a number of specified courses for history majors for valid reasons for a long time because the school faculty had reasoned that when these history majors graduated and became historians or historiographers later on, they'd have to rely on the training they were receiving now.
Moreover, if people are to participate in a globalized economy, they're going to have to compete with foreign-trained historians who surely will have received from their own schools a very strenuous caseload of required courses.
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