CREATIVE INTERESTS STRESSED OVER EXAMS, LECTURES IN UNIQUE COURSE

One group around Harvard is actually disregarding books, lectures, and examinations, and pursuing a policy of free expression in students' creative work. Architectural Science courses 2a and 2b are conducted on a plan which has never been paralleled at Harvard.

The courses, preparatory to graduate work in the School of Design, afford the members an almost unlimited choice in the type of artistic work they may do. Not only is this program unique at Harvard but colleges throughout the country are coming to look to it to blaze a path of progressive teaching through the traditional conservatism of undergraduate instruction.

To Stimulate Initiative

Attempting "to stimulate students' initiative, inventiveness, and individual preferences," the course is conducted on the promise that it may well supply the only opportunity the students will ever have to remain "unconcerned with the technical aspects" of the arts in favor of developing individual creative talents.

Formal lectures and examinations have been abandoned and marks are only issued to satisfy University requirements. Instead, student enthusiasm and interest inspire discipline and concentrated labor.

Most impressive among the projects now underway is a mural being painted on the wall behind the main stairway in Bunt Hall by John A. Holabird Jr. '42, following the theme that man must retain his individuality despite modern machinery and industrialization. The mural expresses, in effect, the fundamental credo of the course.

Build Marionette Theatre

A collapsible marionette theatre is under construction by Joseph R. Passonneau '42, while Eugene S. Austin '42 is experimenting with a lighted metal mural for an airport. A potter's wheel has been built for experimenting in ceramics. The sixteen students enrolled in the advanced 2b course, now in its first year of existence, are also creating "interpretations" in wood and tin, drawing and painting.

Samuel F. Hershey, Instructor in Design, summed up the new program which is slowly growing to intercollegiate proportions, by saying. "Design today is an orderly arrangement of materials for our own service to fit the circumstances, and it can manifest itself in any one the projects."