I

Frogs perceive the world only as a schematic digaram of what is relevant to them. They see nothing that does not move toward them. In that they always move forward; that is all they ordinarily need. They occasionally starve to death in a cage supplied with dead flies.

The usual object of our affections, man is also conditioned to perceive that which he finds useful for survival. Man lives in the world of information he originally needed for hunting and gathering. Like his organs of perception, this world has not changed much since Harvard first brought wisdom to the New World.

The use of that world of information, however, is a reflection of his culture. To wit, a farmer sees a different meadow than a city the large human questions at stake than can a different notion of "culture" than a bacteriologist or intellectual historian.

However, unlike frogs-as-far-as-we-know, man, and particularly the young of the species, notices a good deal more than is perhaps immediately or ultimately significant for his continued existence. He often needs to respond in some way to these notices.

Unless you believe that the individual must be molded to meet the relevant and increasingly specialized needs of his society and not vice versa, this response to irrelevant perceptions is of value. Each individual must at some point have the opportunity for that response. I feel, and I suppose this must be a personal decision, that the further narrowing of the area in which each individual responds even slightly will unduly crimp his growth.

A responsibility to the rest of humanity and their experience far outweighs profound specialization, an ultimately vain search. Indeed, the society's demands complicate themselves faster as specialized skills are developed to deal with the complications. Specialization is a tool that deals only with fragments. This world is not yet so shattered.

Historically, man's need to respond to seemingly irrelevant material was a tremendous adaptive advantage because it led to discoveries of quantitatively better ways to live. This advantage still exists and functions better in individuals than in institutions which may churn our these discoveries faster. The greatest value of such discoveries is in the making of them. As improvements, they hardly affect the quality of life. Moreover an institution making a collective discovery does not respond with joy of the charming human sort. The occasional incidents of one man's joy of discovery are perhaps more important to the quality of life and the advancement of learning than the discovery itself.

Each individual must make his own irrelevant discoveries in order to live in a world built on the irrelevant discoveries of his fellows. There is a need for the specialized abilities required to use some of these discoveries, but a response to a really round world helps keep it round.

The undergraduate education ought to be a time of some of the most important world-discoveries. Man's perception, unlike that of the frog-by-itself, is strongly, though perhaps not carefully, shaped by education. The university is entrusted with the vital task of shaping the foundations of that sensibility, a responsibility that must be its prime function.

Harvard lies in a unique position to effect constructive change in the way an individual is shaped for his last half-century. The University's stature in the educative community ensures that what is done in Cambridge will be felt throughout the country. Indeed, Harvard is a center for the education of educators, who will carry marks of thought here deep into the foundations of the next generation's education.

Such great resource and power carry with them an equally great obligation. That obligation goes far deeper than a simple, single-minded devotion to the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is better advanced by transmission than by collection. Tis a highway and no walled-in city alley.

II

At present the undergraduate education is an attempt to balance a disciplined competence with the cultivation of a broader understanding. A worthy objective. However, the emphasis in such general exposures to other worlds has been on the study of records of perception instead of any investigations of the worlds themselves. Consequently the student may never catch sight of the problems of the realm in question as he wanders more and less lost in the maze of great names, books and categories.

A student's understanding is not greatly deepened because he can distinguish the style of Delacroix from that of Gericault, though his eyesight may improve. Learning to write expository criticism is not as important as learning to look. Criticism can only distinguish between styles, disciplines and forms, and consequently deals only with the tools of perception. Tools are a means, not an end.

A better understanding of fine arts and the visual world may result from first-hand experience with what the artists saw and the materials of line and color they used to deal with that "what." A painting of a nude makes more sense to one who has seen a nude.

Guidance along these lines is more likely to aid in the appreciation of the visual world than are histories of artists predicated on bald verbal exposition. How can you preserve a visual tradition for the blind? The critical perception must be balanced by the imaginative perception.