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General Education

Educated persons tend to be inquisitive about all aspects of life; they seek, evaluate, and use information to make informed, reasonable decisions in a complex world of personal, professional, and environmental challenges. Parkland College is committed to equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and values essential for educated persons to realize their potential as learners, workers, and valuable participants in a global society.

The General Education core curriculum requirements in communications, social and behavioral sciences, humanities and fine arts, mathematics, and physical and life sciences are central to the mission of Parkland College. The requirements are designed to provide an enlightening, interrelated program that ensures a wide range of diversified knowledge and promotes lifelong intellectual inquiry. Students enter Parkland with different levels of general knowledge; all of Parkland’s academic offerings will help them grow by improving their individual skills and competencies and by providing experiences in areas they have not yet explored.

The Parkland College faculty has developed the following General Education objectives. Students will:

• demonstrate their ability to read, write, listen, and speak effectively;
• demonstrate their ability to solve problems, by collecting and evaluating facts and using methods of scientific inquiry;
• demonstrate their ability to compute and to think and express themselves effectively in quantitative terms;
• demonstrate their creative and analytical potential and their ability to appraise the quality, value, and significance of cultural components and artifacts, such as literature, sculpture, painting, music, performing arts, media arts, and spoken rhetoric;
• demonstrate their ability to use technology, especially computer technology, to access, retrieve, process, and communicate information;
• demonstrate their understanding of worldwide political, social, behavioral, and economic issues and ideas, as well as historical, cultural, and geographical perspectives;
• demonstrate information literacy and their ability to think critically, which includes identifying biases and selecting and evaluting sources from varying as well as conflicting positions;
• demonstrate ethical core values in making personal, social, academic, and professional decisions;
• demonstrate their awareness and understanding of diversity and its importance in cultures, ideas, perspectives, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation.