This radiation problem has a regrettable complement at Harvard, for the General Education hope that a citizen might have some comprehension of the problems of science and scientists is balked here. The sciences thwart General Education, which is pointless if it cannot teach the three areas of knowledge on a roughly equal level. Scientists in the University rarely agree to give Gen Ed courses, and the notable exceptions, men like Kemble, Cohen, Nash, Holton, and LeCorbeillier are left to keep on teaching the courses year in and year out.

Numbers tell part of the story. Compare the Gen Ed course offerings this year. Lower-level courses were spread about equally among the three areas, but second group courses were rare in the sciences:

A Comparison

Natural sciences: Five lower-level courses. Five second group half-courses, two of them limited by prerequisites to those who had studied much science.

Humanities: Six lower-level courses. One full course in the second group, and nine half-courses.

Social Sciences: Five lower-level courses. Three full courses in the second group, and six half-courses.

An adequate Nat Sci in the biological sciences, Nat Sci 8, filled a gap of many years' standing this year. This brought the elementary offerings up to par with the other two areas, but the deficiency in second group courses shows all the more clearly now.

The sciences need these courses particularly, for their ordinary departmental courses are, to the nonconcentrators at least tedious memorization interrupted by lab writeups and protected by prerequisites. As the Kaysen report showed this fall, non-concentrators will not take these courses, for they belong too much to closed circuit education that bars intellectual experimentation.

There are three main reasons why scientists do not teach these courses.

Time is the greatest. One Gen Ed committee member, who has strongly argued the need of more science in the program concedes:

"The burden the scientist carries today in keeping up with advances in this field, doing important research, and giving direction to advanced students is very heavy. By and large, classroom teaching of the Gen Ed sort seems to the scientist apart from his main scientific concerns."

Some scientists do teach Gen Ed courses, and their example seems to argue that a main concern of the scientific community is indeed giving the non-scientist some general understanding of this field of knowledge.

Other scientists have no sympathy at all for the idea of General Education. Some, perhaps educated abroad, feel that a man should be generally educated before he comes to college, and that if he is not, he can still pick up a general education on his own if he amounts to anything. Consequently they argue that General Education is a worthlesss scheme.

Still others believe that a Gen Ed approach is impossible in science, or that it must lack content. They believe that only the rigorous and specific approach to science is meaningful. They deny the value of trying to teach the philosophy and methodology of science by giving the student a broad view of some of the major problems in the area and the means used to solve them.

These individuals rarely understand what actually takes place in a Nat Sci course, or else they pick upon the discontinued offerings which students named "cocktail biology." Their conversation betrays an analogy with ninth-grade general science.