Less Forcible Feeding at Harvard

Harvard has moved a step farther away from the theory that a man may become educated merely through passive exposure to education. The university has always avoided the rigid requirements set in the past by American colleges upon regular classroom attendance, but now a still larger measure of freedom is to be granted in Cambridge in this respect. Hereafter, not only honors men but all seniors in good standing may make even more liberal use of their own discretion in determining how many lectures or recitations they will attend, without being subjected to any disciplinary penalty unless they make gross abuse of the right.

The justification directly assigned for the change by the Harvard CRIMSON is that "it brings nearer the day when (all) Harvard undergraduates (except freshmen) will rightfully be regarded as conscientious students, interested in their own scholastic welfare and hence competent to regulate their own attendance at college classes." Probably this is the goal which the Harvard authorities had uppermost in mind when they made the new grant, and unquestionably it is one of the ends which the grant will serve. The change promotes emphasis upon the undergraduate's own desire to gain real values from his college career, with diminishing stress on the notion that he must be forcibly fed.

The ultimate consequences of this shift of emphasis concerning the individual student will become, if the new tendency is long continued, very extensive. It can scarcely fall to exert a modifying effect upon the whole structure of American college education. Less and less faith will be placed, for example, in the importance of lectures, and more and more regard will be given to all those efforts which the student is led to undertake largely upon his own initiative to wit, energetic collateral and "outside" reading, debate among his fellows, and direct learning from qualified preceptors. In short, American colleges and universities, many of which have recently taken steps similar to that now ordered at Harvard in relaxing the rigidity of classroom requirements, seem in general to be moving more and more toward the principles and concepts which prevail in the age-old universities of Great Britain and of the European Continent. --Boston Transcript.