To the Editor of the Crimson:

While there is much that is praiseworthy in the Crimson's scandalized attitude toward the tutoring school business, nevertheless, in the opinion of one who has no personal or practical interest in whether such schools flourish or perish, I sincerely believe that the Crimson's campaign is predicated on the fallacy that the Schools are an evil per se and that if the schools were abolished, the stables would be cleaned.

I do not believe this is the case. The Crimson fails to consider the essential reason for the existence of such establishments. If the Student Council poll was accurate, it is absurd to suppose that two-thirds of the undergraduate body are the indolent non-workers which you imply. What sends a student to a tutoring school in nine-tenths of the cases is not primarily a last-minute effort to get a course into his head; it is rather the desperate attempt of the average student to find some order in the chaos which a series of disorganized and pedestrian lectures leaves him. I can speak only with authority as to my own experience in the English Department in the years 1933-37. It was significant that in the well-taught courses--for example, those of Professors Kittredge, Greenough, and Murray--virtually no student had any need or desire for tutoring. It was rather in such courses where a tremendous reading list was supplemented not with exposition or enlightenment on the subject matter, but with a series of the disorganized personal ideas of the individual lecturer that the average student found himself hopelessly adrift on a sea of pedantic, inchoate, vague impressions. And it is this very type of lecturer who at the end of the year thrusts before his students an examination requiring careful and categorical organization. But how can a student categorize if he has never been taught to do so? The exceptional one can; the average one is forced, in many cases against his will, to seek assistance elsewhere.

I believe the correction of the evil lies not in abolishing the "intellectual brothels" of the Square, but in attacking the hopeless substitutes for "teaching" found in the Yard. Cammann Newberry '37.