The College Scene, having observed the good and the bad in Harvard College, has offered some conclusions on the state of the College. In the concluding three articles it proposes to offer recommendations, more or less specific, for improvement upon the status quo.

In 1871 a young assistant professor in Harvard College wondered what men thought they could do with the education they got in the Yard. Henry Adams asked one of his students that question one day. The answer: "The degree of Harvard College is worth money to me in Chicago."

Other ideas have disappeared from Cambridge since Henry Adams and 1871, but not the absence of ideals implicit in the reply of the gentleman from Chicago. Harvard College is worth a great many different things to different people in 1948, but there are few undergraduates beyond their Sophomore year who could answer: "I am here because I want to learn, and I am learning." Most men would have no answer at all, or they might say they are at Harvard because they have nothing else they would rather do.

Henry Adams was upset by the answer to his question, and there is good reason for educational philosophers to be disturbed by the replies of today. People prate of colleges providing young men with "practical experience" or "social stability" or "the free mind," but no formal educational process can call itself a success unless it gives to its recipients, along with facts and experience, the desire and ability to learn.

That desire and ability are neither so widespread nor so easy to acquire as might be supposed. When the tutoring schools were banned in 1940, and again during a recent abortive renaissance, many critics of the College made the point that the "intellectual brothels" were teaching students how to learn who had been either unwilling or unable to acquire that ability before. The simple process of knowing how to read a book or hear a lecture so that one can understand it and then repeat its contents has not been successfully achieved by every Harvard graduate.

The Desire to Learn

The desire to learn is rather than the ability. The emphasis at Harvard and at almost all other American colleges is on results--i.e., marks. The student who gets passing marks is no one's concern but his own, regardless of what kind of an education he is getting. And every undergraduate knows how easy it is, lo! even in the hallowed halls of Cambridge, Mass., to acquire passing grades without knowledge. Conversation might be a barometer: is there more discussion about knowledge gained in College courses or about the possibility of "bulling through" them without doing the work? One would guess the latter.

Emphasis on marks, on performance up to a rigid, narrow, easily scaleable standard is emphasis on superficiality. With that superficiality an undergraduate can go astonishingly far in Harvard College without knowing what he is missing: for there are good things in the Yard to be gleaned by those who would. One senior about to graduate remarked recently that he had just read a book for a course and was amazed to find out how interesting the subject and the courses were. He wished he had done other reading for the course and had been to more lectures. He wished he had been to more lectures and had done more reading during the last four years. He wished, in other words, that he had been given a glimmer, as a Freshman, of the desire to learn.

The Fear of Change

How to make people want to learn is not a simple problem. Its chief stumbling block in local educational philosophizing has always been the fear that any change in the delicate balance of faculty and students would lead away from the independence of which the University and the College have been so proud. There is a thesis which implies that any change toward making people want to learn will mean a dean's office telling students what courses to take, or perhaps a psychoanalyst asking each man what he is thinking every day.

This stumbling block of precious independence is in fact a false and unnecessary obstacle. Change in the method of learning does not imply that students must be told what to learn. Effective or ineffective educational methods can be used with Eliot or with Hutchins. In fact, more interference from a central college authority is not equal to better education.

The place to change the educational process, to make the desire to learn an end along with social and technical accomplishments, is within the individual course. In the structure of the courses there is room for radical and significant improvement, improvement within the traditional individidualist framework of Harvard College.