The themes that UNE presents each year cover a specific set of goals and aspirations for its students. The themes include: “environmental awareness, social and global awareness, critical thinking, and citizenship and civic engagement” (CAS Core Handbook 3). Each year from freshman year to senior year is assigned one of the themes, in order from which they were listed. Environmental awareness stresses the relationship between people and their environment and how we impact it through many different mechanisms in society. This is taught through environmental issues, laboratory science, English comp, math, and exploration classes. Social and global awareness looks at traditions of societies throughout history with two social global awareness courses and two human traditions courses. During a students’ third year at UNE, they focus on critical thinking that helps to challenge and advance students past their problems and adversities. A course in the students’ major is taken for the critical thinking course requirement. However, “if the department only discusses the great instruction in cognitive ability, [and] critical thinking skills… [then] it is probably a worthless major” (Waechter). Critical thinking is a crucial and vital skill for any occupation or major in life. Finally, citizenship and civic engagement is learned in order to enable students to bring together their previous college years and their future post-college years to be civically engaged in the community. Two advanced study courses and a creative arts experience course are taken to fulfill the senior year theme. On top of these theme courses, students are required to take courses that fall under their major. Therefore, students may take a greater percentage of STEM courses or a greater percentage of arts courses, depending on their major. However, no matter what a students’ major is, they must participate in some sort of STEM course.
The naysayer quote helps me to build reliability by arguing against critical thinking, but critical thinking helps students. Critical thinking is required though out life no matter what one does. If a major focuses on critical thinking it is not useless.
