WORDS TO A NEWER WORLD

Just ahead is the festive glitter of the Christmas vacation, but hanging heavy over that are the dark clouds of Judgment Time. And so--particularly among Freshmen--there are beginning to appear the usual cases of pre-exam intellectual indigestion. Sometimes this is the result of a real hazy indetermination as to what the first semester was all about; among Freshmen more often it is a psychopathic feat that Harvard is, after all, a very hard place, too hard to get through without special medicine.

Whatever the reason for these mental illnesses, the greatest danger lies in the lure of fake remedies; for the sick man is an all-too-easy victim of the first best quack who happens to cross--and bar--his way; he believes in miracles as the drowning man believes in his straw. Harvard has its quack doctors in plenty, its tutoring schools perched along Massachusetts Avenue. Sick people flock in, sick people flock out. Liberal education at its best.

When Mid-years drag around and the yearly epidemic begins, there is only one all-encompassing piece of advice on tutoring schools to be handed out: Don't. This year it is not merely academic idealism and intellectual honesty which inspires the Crimson's call for a concerted boycott or blockade or cram parlors; there is no need to invoke sacrifices for a noble cause. A cool-headed, pragmatic consideration of facts should now prove entirely sufficient to convince even the most hardboiled loafer of the inadvisability of acquiring per express a canned Harvard education.

The information handed out by the tutoring schools, however plentiful, however zealously inculcated, strips down to a warped skeleton of data which is only vaguely related to the essence of a college course. When the fatal hour strikes, the cram-stand scholar will find that, in return for his purchasing power, he has a head-bursting mass of detail. When he is asked to demonstrate his understanding and coordination of the material, he will have nothing but facts--and at the most, trite formulae stringing them together. Maybe these formulae stringing them together. Maybe these formulae will be enough, but then they very likely will not be. Then again, they may very possibly tear down his grade, since the staffs of survey courses have ruled to penalize "canned information" on examinations.

This disregards, of course, the man who can produce a legitimate reason for tutoring--backwardness, illness, other activities. To him the University-sponsored Supervising Bureau offers cheaper and more efficient help; and even those who get a vicarious thrill out of "intellectual brothels" should succumb to the argument of a fuller purse and higher grades. As far as all other men are concerned, they stand only to lose by the garblings and the false emphases and the generally confusing misinterpretations of Square authoring. It offers a good which is at best unreliable, and which is much more than likely dangerous.