The first step in all of this is for individual faculty members, departments, and universities to codify for themselves why gen ed is relevant. In some cases this might involve actually *making* it relevant. But usually it’s just a matter of articulating something that’s already there. Especially important are the often underexplained non-vocational arguments for the relevance of gen ed, having to do with citizenship and humanity and all that other stuff that is always gestured toward but rarely cashed out.

I’ve always hated the idea that humanities courses teach “critical thinking”; I think that students are already capable of critical thinking in non-academic contexts, and it’s the height of arrogance to think that we need to teach them to think. (Of course, we can teach logic and argumentation, but I think that most of that is teaching students names for things they already know about.) What I always try to teach in general undergrad courses is that “The same kind of critical thinking you already do in other contexts is exactly the same kind that you should do in this unfamiliar context.” Or, in other words, that their college courses are indeed relevant to them, and they are relevant to their college courses.

That’s what I see you getting at in this piece — that social media can help students see that philosophy and biology and French are *real world* subjects, not (only) academic subjects.