STUDENTS LECTURE TEACHERS

Concentrators' reports on the Field of Psychology surround the Department with no rosy glamour of praise. Only in research is the personnel fully qualified. Judged by this criterion alone the field at Harvard is the equal, if not the leader of any other department in the country. This, however, nearly exhausts the favorable comment on the Field as a whole.

Recommendations for the reform of elementary courses should be scrutinized carefully. Hardly a dissenting voice can be found among critics of Psychology A. Its context, assigned reading and lecturer are attacked with a fervour which carries conviction. Psychology is regarded as being over-technical and quite beyond the attainments of most beginners. There is practically unanimous opinion that reconstruction of the elementary courses is not some time in the distant future but immediately.

The suggestion that the two half courses be converted into a single full course of the omnibus variety is a very practical one. Undoubtedly a full course organized in this way would not attain the popularity of Psychology A. But at least a graduate of the elementary course would no longer come forth with his taste for psychology blunted through innocuous teaching, or with the conviction that he really knew something about the subject, merely because of the course's superficiality. The harm done either the concentrator or the non-concentrator in either case is as obvious as it is destructive.

Further, and even more serious charges are leveled at the tutorial instruction and lecturing in the Field. Two tutors are regarded as adequate or more than adequate. The others are--no weaker words are permissible--miserably incompetent in the performance of their duties. The rating of lecturers and their abilities is hardly more edifying but fully as enlightening as to the nature of the field. It is well to have many good research men, but that is not enough. The sprinkling of fine, stimulating teachers mark the Department as occasional oases on a desert--a desert through which a concentrator has, nevertheless, to travel.

These two great flaws, in tutoring and in lecturing, may, in turn, account partly for the field's reputation as a "snap" and magnet of many men who care not a whit for the subject or for education generally. Once in the Department, lacking self-motive power, they continue to drift in the doldrums, with little departmental breeze to spur them onward. More than this, if the field is to shed its odious name, it must look to all its standards and requirements.

Such criticism, it is true, is counterbalanced to a degree by the men with natural interest, a purposeful use of psychology, or a good tutor. But these men, it is generally considered, do not constitute a majority. Much reform must be planned if Psychology is to make the most of itself, both in its own interest and for students.