FEWER LECTURES

Before the invention of printing lectures were the chief means of conveying factual knowledge. Today, when books of every sort abound, there is no longer need for a "transfer of material from the professor's notebook to the student's, without its passing through the mind of either." Lectures which are little more than an oral correspondence course have no place in the college.

Yet the old-fashioned lecture is still given in some Harvard classrooms. In not a few courses there is much halting presentation of badly digested abstracts from textbooks, material which may be assimilated through the eye much more rapidly than through the ear. And there seems to be a feeling that an instructor who cannot talk fifty-seven minutes on every daily topic is unworthy of his hire; seldom is a class dismissed, as it well might be, at the end of forty-five minutes; seldom does an instructor confess that the wealth of excellent reading material on a certain section of the field covered by his course make two meetings a week rather than three sufficient for that period. And the number of courses in which, as a result, lectures are industriously shunned, testifies to the need for a swing towards fewer, and better lectures.

That recent years have brought a trend in this direction is plain. A large number of courses include only two lectures per week. The tutorial system, and more particularly the reading period, have emphasized the central importance of reading by the individual student, with supplementary comment in tutorial discussion and in lectures. It is the function of the lecturer, as of the tutor, to suggest what books should be read, and, once they are read, to give a critical interpretation of the material covered. There is no reason to assume that in every case the wealth of an instructor's information over and above that obtainable in books, together with his interpretative views, are such that it is essential for him to talk twice a week for a half year. Thirty-two dull, padded disquisitions (and who has not heard young instructors confess to this vice?) might give way to fifteen comparatively brilliant ones, delivered towards the end of the semester. The more the faculty become convinced that their function is to comment, not to instruct, that the ideal is not to talk fifty-seven minutes three times a week, but to use lectures as sparingly as possible, the more time the student will have at his disposal, and the more it will be borne in on him that the initiative lies with him in acquiring, through his reading, a grasp on material, and a point of view which the instructor may modify in lectures.