The increasing size of classes seems to demand, as an administrative convenience, that a student be judged and classified. As a consequence, the students are assigned work in prescribed forms to facilitate mass judgments. How can we expect to open new areas of thought if even visual ideas are treated the same as verbal ideas, in verbal exposition?

With words too, one must go outside the frame of exposition in order to properly understand their limits and meanings. There are other forms of word-use as valuable as exposition that deal with different, not worthless, problems. Exposition is spoiled when it must strain to deal with every kind of problem.

Here we study poetry, if at all, for insight into more poetry, not for a poet's insight into the world. Poetry is more than an elaborate form of chess. No other vehicle can carry you so headily into some warm regions of thought. Those regions are worth visiting, filled as they are with a wealth that is inexhaustible, because rediscovered and thus enhanced by each new problem.

All too often, students are encouraged to read poetry as a puzzling form of prose to be elucidated by sweet exposition. Cataloguing the various senses of a character in Shakespeare can kill in glibness the possibility of understanding of his vision. Teach the Bible, but not because it is seventeenth-century English literature.

Teaching "beauty" as a thing to be weighed and catalogued destroys the sense of the word. Over-used, the word has fallen far from its status as "truth." This progressive loss of meaning was at least abetted by the cold, analytic approach to the term in the University.

The contemplation of the truths in poetry is a vital step in a student's growth. The General Education Program in the Humanities was invented for that sort of growth. How else do it? What other function can there be for requiring the study of humanities?

In the social sciences, we are taught to distinguish and use the various constructs men have super-imposed on macroscopic human relations. We are asked to imitate and admire successful paradigm-makers. Fun? Yes, but no finite construct has or can adequately describe let alone explain any large sum of human activity.

The bad effects of such contractual training are evident in the over-simplified and over-ambitions rhetorics that are seriously imposed in contemporary politics.

The obligation of the social sciences is to make a student more aware of questions of responsibility in society, and not in the mechanics of the artificial disciplines created to study it. This is not done by teaching old dogmas. Social analysis is often intended and all too frequently read as dogma: that is its principal flaw.

A study of social problems on a more intimate level may be more useful. The arena of human motivation and interplay of an average poker game is studded with more insights into the large human questions at stake than can be drawn from Hegel.

Of course the University need not organize poker games, although it now gives credit for group therapy and statistics. Too much time is spent, though, on abstract theory which may stand in the way of understanding the true social science, if it really be a science, that of understanding people.

The rigorous demands for early specialization in the natural sciences render inaccessible much of the insight that science offers.

Advances in the scientific specialties require early, intense concentration on getting to know the tools of research. These advances are important but perhaps overrated. Too often the advancement of science is mistaken for the idol to whom obeisance is due instead of the amelioration of the lot of man. In either case, the idol often calls for human sacrifice.

The relation of a scientist's work to any human needs beyond the desire to be accepted by the scientific community is perhaps the least explored area in the field. It is a very real problem. A concerted effort to bring the scientific understanding home to a society so largely shaped by the products of that understanding is too valuable to be shunted aside as secondary to research.

Each individual should at least learn to see through some of the fraud that is passed off as science. Almost all the claims of the drug industry need to be greeted with more discriminating eyes. The scandal over cyclamates and the general confusion over poisons in foodstuffs seem to illustrate a misunderstanding of what science and technology are in the wold. The power that science has unleashed has engendered a cross-eyed belief and consequent perversion of much scientific knowledge.