By asattar949@gmail.com 
I was 18 when I first set foot on a college campus in this country. Up until that point, I had lived and gone to school in Karachi, Pakistan, with the majority of those 18 years spent under a military, religious dictatorship. My educational options beyond high school were limited to mostly pursuing medicine, banking or engineering. Imagine my thrill then at enrolling in a liberal arts college in the U.S. It’s impossible for me to capture my excitement on the day that the course catalog arrived in the mail. I pored over it, highlighting and taking notes on all the courses that seemed interesting. I couldn’t believe the choices I had!
In my first year in college, I took courses in dance, sociology, philosophy, classics and economics. I went on to take courses in anthropology, English, environmental chemistry, geology, history, psychology, religious studies and theater, among others, and majored in sociology/anthropology, classics and gender and women’s studies, with a minor in economics. Why did I have so many majors? It was an exercise in freedom — intellectual freedom. And while exercising my intellectual freedom, I stumbled into disciplines I had never been exposed to before.
Some I never pursued again; others changed my life. In my view, there is nothing more precious about U.S. higher education than this sense of intellectual freedom combined with the academic freedom afforded to students and teachers alike. Yet, there are those in Florida who wish to snuff out these freedoms. They started with censoring certain topics, then they targeted Advanced Placement courses and now they’re eliminating entire disciplines.
One of those disciplines is sociology. In accordance with a vote of the Florida Board of Education, Principles of Sociology will no longer be part of the selection of social science courses that fulfill the general education or “core” requirements at the state’s public colleges. On Wednesday, the Board of Governors, which oversees Florida’s university system, passed the same rule for the state’s 12 public universities.
Principles of Sociology was the first college course I walked into in college. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at 8:30 a.m., I sat, entranced for an hour. Given that I became a professor of sociology, it’s safe to say that the experience changed my life.
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What do students in Florida lose with the removal of sociology from their general education curriculum? What does sociology teach us that is valuable? The answers are, of course, impossible to confine to a few paragraphs. But if I had to choose the most important and distinctive lessons of sociology, it would be what the sociologist C. Wright Mills stated in “The Sociological Imagination” in 1959. The possessor of the sociological imagination, according to Mills, understands (1) the intersection of history and biography in understanding their own life experiences, and (2) the distinction between personal troubles and public issues.
According to Mills, an individual can fully understand their experience only by locating oneself within the larger historical period and understanding the connections between one’s own life and the lives of those who are in similar circumstances. To make this lesson concrete, we can look at the effects of COVID-19 on student learning. The latest data show that on average, students in grades 3-8 lost half a year’s worth of learning in math. In communities like Richmond, Virginia, or New Haven, Connecticut, the loss was far more pronounced — nearly 1½ years lost in math instruction. In Kissimmee, students lost nearly eight months of math instruction, whereas in Orlando, they only lost about 2½ months.
So, when a current high school student in Kissimmee struggles with math, and seems behind compared to peers in Orlando, it is only through understanding how their particular life was affected by the larger pandemic that we begin to understand the issue in its complexity. The latest research published by the Education Recovery Scorecard illuminates that learning loss was greater in districts with larger populations of low-income and minority populations and in districts where hybrid-remote learning extended longer. Within each district, though, there was no significant difference in the learning loss along income or racial lines, underscoring the significance of what was happening district-wide, rather than at the household level.
Mills’ second lesson was to make the distinction between “troubles” — problems that are connected to one’s individual character and immediate circumstances and relations — and “issues” — problems that transcend one’s local environment and personal life. This distinction is particularly important since defining the source of a problem determines the kinds of solutions we seek for those problems. Understanding this distinction makes it clear that students’ learning loss during COVID is not a matter of personal failure and it cannot be addressed by simply asking them to study harder. That approach may work for a few students, but it will not explain, nor will it solve, COVID’s uneven effects on learning. Our solutions for the problem of learning loss due to the pandemic have to be sociological and extend beyond the individual and family level in order to be effective.
What could be more important for future problem solvers, creators, risk takers, innovators, lawmakers, teachers and students than understanding how our lives are shaped by the cultural and structural forces around us and how we collectively shape them in return? What could be more important than having the ability to distinguish between personal troubles and societal issues so we can seek meaningful solutions to our collective problems?
In strongly objecting to Florida’s plan, department of sociology heads at 10 of the state’s public universities wrote to the Board of Governors that introductory sociology courses have been “an integral part of higher education for nearly two centuries.” The decision to remove sociology from the core curriculum is a tragic blow to students’ intellectual freedom. It will prevent generations of students from being introduced to subject matter that is uniquely suited to address complex challenges. As Mills also observed, the lessons of sociology are both terrible and magnificent. Any true and honest examination of human life could be nothing less. And our students deserve nothing less.
Afshan Jafar is the chairperson of the Department of Sociology at Connecticut College. She was co-chairperson of the American Association of University Professors’ committee that produced “Report of a Special Committee: Political Interference and Academic Freedom in Florida’s Public Higher Education System.”
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