Why does freshman English remain the only common course of American college students While within recent memory, requirements such as a foreign language and a course in western civilization made part of a common set of courses for the over-whelming majority of freshman students, only composition has survived to define the nationally agreed on minimum for the meaning of the liberal arts and science.
But not even the defeated defenders of the old requirements claimed that one gained from them any more than the "language" of the discipline involved--a way of "talking", of asking questions and discussing possible answers to them.