Harvard is making an experiment just now with its undergraduates that is highly interesting and the outcome of which is worth looking forward to. At Cambridge the undergraduates, facing mid-years, have since the Christmas vacation been "on their own," no classes having been held by the Faculty and the student body left to its own devices to pass the examinations just ahead. This hiatus is called a "reading period," and its purpose is to give the students a chance not only to catch up on the fast-flying regular work of the first term but to put in some real work in rather more than "preparing" for the tests to come. The theory is, of course, that a serious student will do much better work and get better results if he is put on his own responsibility--a theory to which we heartily subscribe. It is also likely that such a quiet period will give the less serious student his first real acquaintance with scholarship and a taste for study that he does not get when under the forcing system of daily required work. At Harvard they do not yet know how this will result. The Harvard Bulletin is satisfied, however, that thus far--halfway through the experiment--there are no sins of languor about the Yard, of sudden golden harvests for the tutoring schools, or increase in outside activities or absences. It thinks that everybody is "harder at work than when classes are in operation," that the Library is more used, and that the experiment promises to be a success when the marks come through on the examined results. The project interests us exceedingly and we hope that Harvard, finding it worth making a regular thing, may be followed by other colleges. Something of the sort might well be tried at Yale.

The fundamental idea in such a change as this, has to do with getting away from the old "keeping-school" theory of education and with substituting for it, within reasonable bounds, individual self-development. The American college is constantly struggling with the problem of how to get the mass of its students interested. The answer is to put them "on their own." The student that is allowed to choose a special topic that interests him, and to work it out for himself under advice, is bound to become interested. Education then become what the word itself means. Yale Alumni Weekly