Novel and refreshing, judging by standards now in vogue, are the theories of teaching outlined by the poet Robert Frost in a recent interview with the press. Mr. Frost, who is conducting a weekly class at Harvard this year, holds no brief for stereotyped spoon-fed education. He states frankly that for him education is a take-it- or-leave-it affair in which he will "just keep silent, or even lie down on the desk until it is realized that what I want is self-starters, not followers of a set routine."

Such an attitude comes like a breath of much- needed fresh air in an academic world grown somewhat musty with too much concern for the mechanical means of education and too little attention to the long-run ends. Though one can perhaps charge Mr. Frost and those of his kind with trying to sensationalize education, so passive has the intellectual role of college students become that it takes considerable effort to jar them out of the well-marked grooves in which they slide along and to force them to do independent thinking . . . Fed several times daily on a diet of formal lectures, prodded by quizzes and factual check-up tests to take every forward step, many undergraduates lose all power of self-starting merely through lack of either the opportunity or the incentive to develop that power.

The dearth of students genuinely interested in their work cannot be blamed solely on teaching methods. Certainly another contributing factor is to be found in the fact that colleges and universities have so increased in both size and numbers that they include in their classes many unfitted to receive a liberal arts education. Just as there is no single cause for a decline in the number of students classed by Mr. Frost as "self-starters," so there is no single panacea which will remedy the situation. However, the inclusion on university faculties of men of Mr. Frost's liberal outlook can do much to bring to the surface the desire for understanding and learning which lies at varying depths in the minds of all students worthy of a university education. --Yale News.