THE REPORT ON EDUCATION

A summary of the report of the Committee on Education appointed last fall by the Student Council appears today. The questions raised therein concern familiar problems of University organization: the problem of securing the freest possible development of the individual within the bulky structure of a great university; the problem of adapting the same educational machinery to students both of modest and of extraordinary capacities; the problem of Freshman acclimatization, of effective operation of the plan of distribution, and many others hardly less significant. The recommendations embodied in the report represent the product of five months' work by the first student committee of the sort ever to be created at Harvard. As such they deserve and will receive the fullest consideration by undergraduates, members of the faculty, and alumni.

With the major recommendations of the Committee, the CRIMSON is in entire accord, although it is not prepared to accept them unreservedly in all their details. The important fact is that they constitute well-considered, balanced suggestions for the solution of generally recognized problems of education, and it is in discussion pro and con that their chief value will obtain.

Most attractive and significant perhaps of all the main proposals set forth is that for the progressive sub-division of the College into smaller groups numbering each a few hundred members. The plan itself is by no means new, but serious, open and general discussion of it is. There are unquestionably grave obstacles to its realization, and it will have to be determined how decisive these would prove. But certainly if the system were effectually established, it would remove many of the most fundamental faults in Harvard life. It appears to be in complete harmony with the genius and traditions of the University, a logical progression in the course of its steady evolution.

The ideal environment for the culturally rounded growth of the individual is the small group, and the most natural union of members is not that of men on the same level, as in the present division in classes, but of undergraduates at varying stages of development.

But the complete discussion of the report will have to wait upon its publication in full in the Advocate. To the several problems which the Committee has suggested the CRIMSON will return in detail later. For the present it invites communications from members of the University concerning any phase of the report, and all such communications will be published in this column.