A PARODY ON EDUCATION

In the mail boxes of most Seniors yesterday morning was a communication of a type long familiar to Harvard undergraduates,--a circular from one of the Massachusetts Avenue tutoring schools. This particular circular, however, differed from most of the others of its kind. It offered to prepare all comers, not as customarily for a quiz, an hour examination, or even a final, but for the divisional examinations in January and May. "It is advisable," ran the legend, "that candidates procure appointments at once for the supervision and planning of their work. Reviews will be given, as usual, a few weeks prior to each set of examinations."

The impertinence and effrontery of this document must have struck all of its readers. As a blanket indictment of the regular body of University tutors, it has seldom been excelled. As a reflection on the general level of intelligence of the Senior Class it was no less descending.

Admittedly, the tutoring school has its legitimate functions. It may prepare sub-Freshmen for entrance, it may assist men who have fallen behind on account of sickness or some such valid reason. Conceivably it might be defended as an occasional help in time of trouble for those who, humanly if weakly, find themselves on the eve of an examination insufficiently prepared for the trial.

But, in actual practice, no tutoring school thus circumscribes its activities. It presumes to be a regular supplement to University instruction. Sometimes it even becomes a substitute on which men, deliberately and beforehand, choose to rely. It need hardly be pointed out that these institutions stand in direct opposition to the University in their ideals of education, if that term can be used for the objects which they foster. The tutoring school is a caricature of modern education, a pedagogical buzzard hovering on the outskirts of an institution of learning. And when it chooses to prey upon men preparing for divisional examinations, of all things, the incongruity is almost laughable.

What to do about it is a more difficult question. The law brought about the virtual extermination of printed notes on lectures, but there seems to be no legal remedy in this case. Probably the only effective solution will be the gradual development of a state of opinion among instructors and students alike which will refuse to tolerate the patronage of these institutions. Until this happy condition is brought to pass, the prosperity of tutoring schools will remain a pretty fair barometer of in how far Harvard is a university in the truest sense of the term, and in how far it is a factory for drilling automatons into a state of mechanical perfection sufficient to pass the factory's regular inspection tests.