Probing the Curriculum: English A

By inaugurating a policy of redoubled stringency on its Freshman anticipatory exams last June, the English A Department expressed in no uncertain terms its intention of ignoring current trends in the College's accelerated curriculum. Members of '46 arriving in June and September were confronted with exams that only a lucky guess and a facile pen could master. As a result, the percentage of men exempted this year from the elementary English course was less than a quarter of the average number that has passed in each previous year. At a time when other quarters in the College have generally appreciated the all-important element of time in the student's war-threatened education and have made appropriate modifications of requirements, this attitude on the part of the Warren House faculty is hard to reconcile.

The conventional directions of the college education have recently met many changes in the face of wartime expediency, and now all but a small minority of Harvard Freshmen are working to train themselves in one of several fields that can best supply military needs. Already the College has voluntarily made its curriculum more limited, and in the near future the choice of electives can be expected to meet much greater restrictions. The liberal arts and survey courses, in which English A training has always played its most important role, are not among these fields of special wartime interest. To hinder, rather than free the choice and progress of the new class in its scientific concentration is to apply one annoying brake on an educational machine that is trying on the whole to accelerate.

Until this year Freshmen could be exempted from the course by one or two methods--either through honor grades on College Board exams or by passing an anticipatory test for which a certain group was considered eligible. The total number excused through these channels remained, until June, between twenty and thirty-five percent of each class. When the Board exams were discontinued, the English A Department took its opening and proceeded through the single medium of its anticipatory to pass only five percent of '46. The value of the course for a certain number of Freshmen is not being questioned, for it can also help many science concentrators. But the current move by this department to increase its enrollment is not only untimely, but inconsistent with the University's efforts to adjust itself to the most immediate needs of the nation.