BETWEEN THE COVERS of Harvard's Courses of Instruction lies a panoramic outline of the world's knowledge, probably unparalleled in United States education. In one description we are invited to learn about ancient history from an archaeological perspective; in another about the energetics of muscle contractions: in still another the scientific influence of Islam. There are in those 55 pages, descriptions of courses on cosmology and developmental psychology on quantitative methods for political science and quantum mechanics.

Nowhere are we told how we can learn to cope with the real world from a human perspective however and too few of us are taking that course on our own Harvard teaches us how to analyze, not how to understand how to quantify not how to live. Its Ivy may be the most effective material ever developed for insulating people from the harsher realities of the outside world.

While thousands more people were filing in and out of the nation's unemployment offices last week wondering how they would be able to feed and clothe their tammes most people here were filing in and out of Memorial Hall and the Science Center wondering how their exam grades would look on their graduate school applications. While people in the United States and abroad died of starvation. Harvard and Radcliffe students complained of the amount of turkey tetrazzint dished up by Food Services. While the clattering of artillery and the whistling of bombs financed by our tax dollars continued in Vietnam, we studied in the cerie silence of Lamont and Hilles.

The inequities are nothing new, but the lack of attention we're giving them is. The New Mood on Campus that the media touted in 1972 is now firmly entrenched. Most of the overt resistance to the United States's war-making machine is gone, or at least in hiding. The people-oriented movements it seems to have spawned--urging equal rights for women, blacks, the poor--are in hibernation, if not retreat.

The American Council on Education polls in-coming freshmen every year, trying to spot trends among our ranks. It found that about one-third of the Class of '78 believes that "the activities of married women are best confined to the home and family": that more than half feel "there is too much concern in the courts for the rights of criminals"; that people are leaving the "left" and "far left" and moving to more moderate positions--the most moderate class since the poll began nine years ago.

IN A HARVARD SQUARE BAR not long ago, a friend lamented to me that "people don't care about students any more."

"That's only fair," I replied. "Students don't care about people any more, either." That piece of inebriated wisdom has haunted me for the last month or so; it has a lot of convincing evidence on its side.

A quarter of a lifetime ago I really believed that students would change the world. Antiwar sentiment was growing: I joined other high school and college students to help organize the October 1969 moratorium in Allentown, Pa. We talked for long hours among ourselves and with others about what the United States government was doing in Southeast Asia, and why it should be stopped; we raised money and printed leaflets; we lined up speakers. When a high school principal refused to declare October 15 a legal day of absence and threatened suspension for moratorium participants, we spent hours in the county courthouse with the help of a friendly law librarian finding a precedent that showed his action at least marginally illegal. He changed his mind. I thought then that I would like to become a lawyer--that it would be the most effective way to stop the injustices that seemed to be strangling the country. A surprising number of people in our organizing group felt the same way.

Come October 15, we spent the day on the street corners of downtown Allentown, talking to people, I remember the icy stares of some, the sympathetic conversations with others, the words "fuckin' hippie" that were spat at me more than once that day. I remember shuttling leaflets and leafletters back and forth from Muhlenberg College to outposts, and the traffic accident I caused on one run. The woman in the old Falcon with the "War is not healthy for children and other living things" bumper sticker found out what I was doing and decided to ignore it; I never told my parents.

Most of all, I remember the feeling that this small band of students had taken on the United States government and had, in a small way, won.

BUT THAT was a quarter of a lifetime ago, and things have changed. I kept in touch with many of the people who helped organize the moratorium for a while, and some of them actually did make it to law school. Most of those who have graduated are now firmly ensconsed in corporate law firms somewhere, because "that's where the money is": others are on their way. I don't write to them any more. Nor do I want to be a lawyer.

Few of the growing number of pre-law students I know now make pretensions to helping the oppressed obtain their rights as the main reason for their following the road to the courts; rather, they say they are trying to find some certainty in an uncertain future. Nor do the swelling ranks of pre-meds talk so loudly about opening a clinic in a ghetto neighborhood and improving health care for the poor, or starting a practice in a rural community without a doctor, most would rather keep with the trend and stay in the more lucrative urban and suburban areas.

"Students don't care about people any more, either." And things don't seem to be improving. The ACE poll discovered that this year's freshman class, the Class of '78, is even more disinterested than last year's. As Richard Nixon went through the last throes of hanging onto his sick, tattered presidency only 36.6 per cent of the incoming freshman class was saying that it was interested in "keeping up with" or influencing political affairs."

It showed up in Mather House last year: large numbers of students and tutors would gather in the Junior Common Room each night after dinner to watch the network news shows--Walter Cronkite for the early eaters. John Chancellor for the later diners. One day last spring, as the dragnet lightened around the White House, CBS watchers found a small hand of Star Trek viewers occupying the tube they were outvoted at first, but soon their numbers grew to the point that Captain Kirk phasered Walter Cronkite, and another tradition was over.

And still the retreat continues. Last week. President Ford asked Congress for an additional half-billion dollars to prop up the Thieu and Lon Nol regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia; more money to visit more death from the skies upon innocent people. The conductor has changed, the orchestra is different, but the composer, Henry A. Kissinger '50, and the symphony of murder and repression are the same. Yet we sit quietly listening to the strains of death, and our voices are still.

HOW HAS THIS happened? How can we sit by quietly and watch our government commit crimes around the globe that would have had us pouring into the streets as little as three years ago? How do we ignore the cries of the hungry, the oppressed, the poor? I refuse to believe that we are any less moral than before, that our hearts cry out for justice less than in the past.

But our hearts, our minds and our actions are no longer so closely linked as they were. Much of the blame must go to the Nixon Administration. At no time in history had the aims of the White House been so consistently alien to the values of the people as during Nixon's reign of terror. He delivered packaged death to Vietnam and we protested; he sliced away at the programs that helped the poor, and we cried out in pain. But never had contempt for youth been so clear in such powerful places as it was during the Nixon regime; never had so many of the government's facilities been employed to strangle opposition, Never had corruption and evil been so clear, and yet so seemingly invincible; never had justice been in so broad a retreat. Faith is a fragile commodity; for many of us, I think, what little faith we had in the system shattered as, despite his crimes. Nixon increased his power in 1972.

And so we were more subdued as the Watergate tales unfolded before us, slowly eating away at the mask Nixon liked to call his "mandate." We were numbed by our past experience, and none of it seemed too incredible--except perhaps the man's persistence.

As historic and as just as the resignation this summer may have been, it provided only momentary relief--only until one realized that the man who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people had left office for what seems, in comparison, petty larceny. The men who had constructed the policies he had implemented stayed on, to inflict those policies on still thousands more innocent victims. John Dean was wrong: the cancer was not eating away at the presidency, it was the presidency, and its ravages have yet to be exterminated.

Yet for a while this summer, it seemed things could change. Here we had Gerald Ford; despite his long-time support for Nixon's Vietnam policies and his opposition to civil rights, there was still hope. Ford lost no time dashing it, pardoning his ex-chief's crimes and revealing the U.S. attempts to "destabilize" the Chilean government, leading to Allende's downfall. Ford only proved once more that the system, which has worked and unworked itself so many times in the past few years that it is hard to believe there is a system at all, belies our hopes.

THERE IS ALSO the fact that few of us are with-out self interests. What many of us do in the next few years we realize, will be controlled by the economy, and the economy, one would be led to believe, is largely beyond our control--beyond anyone's control. The barrage of news stories in print and on the airwaves about depression and rising unemployment are impossible to ignore completely, even behind the ivy lines. And despite President Bok's optimistic claim that "if you went to Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., you might have to worry about a job, but at Harvard you don't have to worry," many of our fears remain unstilled. We question what value our education will have when we leave Harvard's womb, and few of us can be certain of the answer. Some of us see, whatever other motives are involved, that lawyers and doctors are always in demand, and scurry off to professional schools; the rest of us wait and wonder.

In an Ambassador taxicab last year, Charlotte Curtis, the editor of The New York Times op-ed page, began arguing the value of an education with the driver. His eight years of Northeastern night school had gotten him nothing more than a piece of paper, he said; had he used his money to purchase a taxi medallion, he could have been a wealthy man, or at least driving his own cab.

"No, Mr. Ambassador, you can't mean that," Curtis said, and she tried to explain how a college education had enriched the man's life, but he remained unconvinced. He had not been able to find a better job, he said, only to hold more intelligent conversations with his fares.

For most of us, the real world is the problem we must face first, and the one that four years at Harvard have prepared us for the least. Despite our assumed intelligence, we get very little news; few of us have televisions, few of us read newspapers that give us a comprehensive view of what is happening outside Harvard. Only in educational institutions, mental asylums and prisons can one choose to shut himself off so completely from the world around him.

Too many of us have succeeded in doing just that. We learn in a vacuum about theories we will be hard-pressed to apply to our fives; we study for examinations and grades rather than for learning or for living Harvard, unfortunately, encourages that.

Many of us--too many of us--will emerge from the University's soft cocoon and find ourselves like the cabbie, bitter that the tools Harvard gave us do not bring much understanding in a world based more on the complex actions of people than on simple facts and figures: that achievement is based on living up to one's potential to help others, not on quantifying and analyzing them. Others of us will ignore our Harvard training and, finding the lessons the real world has to offer more interesting, start over. Still others will find a way to successfully mold the two together.

I OFTEN QUESTION the motives of journalists, including myself. They at once perform the easiest and most difficult jobs in the world: difficult, because they must face the real world every day, see its problems and hear its cries; easy, because they can hide behind a veil of objectivity and assume that because they are chronicling the world's pain, someone else will relieve it. This article is one example; I could assume that the mere act of writing it will change people's minds, break them away from the apathy and frustration that seem to engulf us all. I don't assume that; and although I have no quick answers, I hope to work toward finding them when I leave here.

I am also optimistic enough to believe that despite the recession, the inflation, the turpitude in government, the desire of many of us to see justice done will lead us to learn how to cope with the real world, how to reach and reach out with our humanity. I can only hope it happens soon.