It is this view of the Faculty Committee on General Education which has impelled some, although by no means all, of the attacks on such programs as advanced standing and the freshman seminars, which exempt some students from part of the Gen Ed Program. For these critics what is relevant is not how good a substitute the freshman seminar or the high-school preparation shown by the A.P. sophomore is for the lower-level Gen Ed course or even how close it comes to being a substitute for the ideal Gen Ed course of the Redbook. Rather, these programs are dangerous to Gen Ed because they bring the student more quickly under the influence of a department.
This, of course, does not mean that the Faculty stands always ready to sacrifice the General Education Program at the least excuse. Since there is little agreement as to what Gen Ed courses do that makes them Gen Ed courses, it is difficult to explain how freshman seminars or high school courses cannot do the same.
However exaggerated such a view may be, it cannot be denied that the General Education Program does not do exactly what the Redbook anticipated it would, and that, in fact, there is little agreement as to exactly what it should be doing.
Against this background of confusion, Dean Ford named a ten-member committee in October, 1962, to review the program. The Committee, headed by Paul M. Doty, professor of Chemistry, would ask, Ford said, "basic questions about the proper role of the American college at a time when the greater part of our students are going on to graduate and professional schools."
Current Choice
Doty's committee is faced with the choice of calling for a revision of the Gen Ed Program to bring it back into conformity with the Redbook, or devising a new rationale for the program.
The easiest solution (and by this time the Committee must find it very tempting) is to Brunerize the Humanities and Social Sciences, turning the General Education Program into a simple distribution requirement.
Such a process will be particularly difficult in the Social Science, since the newer "methodology" courses, such as Soc Sci 8, have much less in common with the traditional Soc Sci than do the various lower-level Nat Sci with each other.
Hopefully, however, it will describe what undergraduates are supposed to learn from the General Education Program in terms definite enough to make it possible to seperate those courses which should be accepted in fulfillment of the lower-level requirement from those which should not. Such a statement, once made, should also make it much easier to define the relationship of the Gen Ed Program to freshman seminars and the Advanced Standing Program.
Redbook Hopes
The Redbook hoped that an understanding of traditions and culture would serve as a unifying force in a society fragmented by differences of occupation and class. General Education was the education necessary to avoid this fragmentation, which the Redbook considered inimical to a democratic society.
Our conclusion, then," it said, "is that the aim of education should be to prepare an individual to become an expect both in some particular vocation or art and in the general art of the free man and the citizen. Thus the two kinds of education (general and special) once given to different social classes must be given together to all alike.
As World War II has faded further and further into history, this rhetoric has found less and less acceptance, particularly in the academic community. Former President Conant, who presided over the institution of the program, is now an outspoken advocate of academic specialization, and Gen Ed is defended today more often as an effort to unify the College than as Harvard's contribution to the re-unification of society.