The secondary schools . . . are not sending to Harvard large quantities of men qualified to assume at the start the captaincy of their own intellects.
Let the student be as free as it is humanly possible.
If properly applied, the tutorial system is a practical solution, a step toward the ideal.
The examinations must go.
There must be more tutors and there must be better tutors.
A Professor remarks with resigned but well-put cynicism that "sometimes one tires of pouring knowledge into buckets without bottoms." He receives the response that he expects, laughter, denoting a class, conscious but not convicted of sin. The dances!
A College publication takes to its bosom the woes of the undergraduate "whose desire for knowledge is distorted by restrictions, and sicklied o'er by contact with the chill, thus must thou do! Ambition burns, but it is shut within a hamper, with the Faculty and the System sitting upon the lid. The tyrants!
The significance of it all is that there exists a dissatisfaction, partially chronic but entirely justified, as to the present status of Education at Harvard. The teaching staff, remembering its own sacrifices for an education, is likely to regard the absence of the will to learn on the part of the undergraduate as the fundamental factor vitiating an otherwise fairly efficient and adaptable educational system. On the other hand the average undergraduate brought face to face with a great machinery that tends to impose a certain orthodoxy upon his fields of mental activity, so classify and label him, to assign a pigeon-hole as the area of his progress, naturally cries "Away with the monster. Paternalism and nothing else is the cause of my stagnation."
Both views are at once right and wrong. Ideally, of course, Harvard should be a place where men eager and even determined to acquire knowledge and wisdom are brought into personal contact with teachers eager to instruct and determined to avail themselves of every art to stimulate and aid the intellectual advancement of individual students.
Should Not Have Much Compulsion
There are, however, some very definite practical limitations to the attainment of this ideal. The secondary schools with their emphasis on compulsion are not sending to Harvard large quantities of men qualified to assume at the start the captaincy of their won intellection Time is required before there can be implanted in them a tradition of intellectual initiative.
A degree of compulsion is essential for another reason. The success which a college education is supposed to bring in the outside world is too nebulous and too remote a prospect to be a successful incitement to diligence in the pursuit of culture. All men are more or less lazy and some entirely so. In many cases it is to be feared that if all intra-College examinations were abolished, undergraduates free to work as they pleased, would work as little as they pleased. It is not fashionable among undergraduates to admit this fact, but it needs no psychological expert to proclaim its obviousness. Some compulsion there must be, but compulsion in Education is an evil, Harvard should have no more of it than is necessary. Let the student be as free as it is humanly possible.
Tutorial System a Remedy
There is a second objection to the ideal--the size of the College. It has been said that one may know all the girls in Boston but as for knowing all the members of one's own class, c'est a rire, the obstacles of numbers is too great. From this numerical incubus arises a difficulty. The personal element tends to disappear from instruction. In any college the quantity of really eminent professors is limited; the more students in a college the less opportunity any student has to receive from these eminent men a stimulation and assistance adapted to his individual needs. Enter the machinery as a substitute and the tutorial plan as a remedy for the thick-fingered bunglings of mechanical
Perhaps, the most pressing necessity before Harvard today is the awakening of intellectual initiative through the minimizing of compulsion and the maximizing of stimulation, by a Faculty, familiar with the needs of individuals rather than the requirements of groups. If properly applied, the tutorial system is a practical solution, a step toward the ideal.
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