(This is the first in a series of three articles. The next two installments will appear in the Wednesday and Thursday issues of the CRIMSON.)

The problem of the tutoring schools has come to our attention again recently and has raised in my mind, at least, a very ominous question. The question is not what is wrong with the tutoring school system, but rather what is wrong with Harvard College? The tutoring school is not a cause of bad education; it is a symptom of bad education.

Let us first review the arguments of those who operate, use, or condone the use of the tutoring school. The thought is that if Harvard College sets up certain criteria of what is to be learned, namely examinations, and does not dogmatically prescribe how these things are to be learned, there is nothing immoral about utilizing the easiest method of learning them. They can point out, and rightly, that getting an education is not the same thing as playing a football game--the purpose is not primarily competitive and therefore "rules of the game" are slightly ridiculous. Education is supposed to be an instrument of success living, economically and socially, and to a certain extent an end in itself.

The common answer to this is that those who do not take shortcuts are forced in preparing for an exam to have mastered most of the material in a course in order to pass, and that therefore the tutoring school should be made illegal, thus forcing everyone to do a modicum of normal studying.

There is a certain amount of truth in this rebuttal, but the whole truth is that many, if not all students use essentially the tutoring school method of approaching examinations. They cram, they use outlines, they borrow their friends' reading notes, they look up old exams in order to spot questions, and they skim frantically over the reading at the eleventh hour. That they are not so successful as professionals in these methods merely indicates that they haven't the scientific approach of the professionals, not that they find the methods morally reprehensible. It can be argued that when a student has to do the cramming on his own he will perforce learn more of the course in general than the professionally tutored student. Here again there is some truth, but this is a difference in degree, not kind, and not a very great difference at that.

Why is this so largely so, and what has Harvard done about it? The College's reaction in 1940 was based on the faulty premise that it was the duller and more backward students who needed help. For that purpose it set up the Bureau of Study Counsel, while in fact the students who went to tutors, and all others who cram both then and now, are perfectly well supplied with grey matter. The trouble lies in the fact that they have in no way been intellectually stimulated by what Harvard has to offer in the classroom, and, since most of them do not intend to go into scholarly careers, they were and are quite content to get passing grades by cramming with or without professional help.

This brings us to the "why" of the problem and some very fundamental questions about the College's educational philosophy. In the first two hundred years of Harvard's history, the College was small, well integrated, and externally disciplined. The curriculum was narrow and solid and so was the student product. The reaction against this has reached its height in the last few decades in the wide curriculum and the elective system. It is now turning out a broad but superficial product whose principal skill is that of quick retentive memory and an ability to disgorge and forget a large number of calculated generalities interlarded with a few facts--and whose intellectual interest in any field of education is highly superficial or non-existent. In a small, well-integrated college this problem does not assume the importance that it does in a large heterogeneous group.