(1) Elementary General Education courses are all given at approximately the same level of difficulty...Such uniformity is in sharp contrast to the variety of student preparation which has been characteristic of the College in recent years.

(2) Elementary General Education courses do not lead directly to opportunities for further study....

(3) Students have too little choice of courses at the elementary General Education level.

In general, our feeling was that the whole structure was becoming static and rigid....If the Committee on General Education could be properly constituted it is likely that it might take a somewhat more venturesome and experimental view of its tasks....

Content of Present Program

The last of the major areas of weakness that the committee found in the General Education Program has to do with content.

In the Humanities we noticed that while there was primary emphasis on literature and while philosophy was also represented, the non-verbal arts figured scarcely at all....Even more significant was the emphasis on the historical and critical as opposed to the practical in our instruction in the arts. In the present General Education Program not a single course is offered that might loosely be called "creative." ...It did seem desirable to the committee that there be some representation of the practice of the arts in the Program if only in a modest, elective role, particularly in view of the availability of such facilities as the Carpenter and Loeb Centers.

In the Social Sciences, some of the members of the committee were struck by the relative neglect of non-Western societies and cultures....

The major omission in the Social Sciences Area, however, was agreed to be in the field of the "systematic" or "behavioral" social sciences. Under these headings, we mean to include mainly the fields of economics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

These are fields linked together by their common search for regularities in human behavior, and by their analytic and qualitative as opposed to historical and qualitative approaches. They are fields that are relatively new in their present increasingly scientific form. They are fields, also that have a strong interest for our under-graduates because of their obvious bearing on many current issues facing both individuals and society....

Finally, in the Natural Sciences the committee was impressed not so much by the omission of particular areas of knowledge (though we did have some concern about the relatively small role of mathematics in the Program) as by the underemphasis on science in student electives....Roughly half the student at Harvard and Radcliffe take only one science course during their college years....There was agreement in the committee that the inadequate exposure to science of half our students represented a serious area of weakness in our present effort and that at least some attempt would have to be made to correct it.

...On the whole, it seemed fair to say that the Harvard Program has tended to give priority to the "classic" themes, achievements, and monuments of our past civilization. The historical has been prominent, in subject matter and often in approach.

IV

A Reformulation

The major task was to revise the basic content and organization of the Program for General Education so that it would: