Council Reports of '31, '39, '40, and '42 Gave "Student Opinion" On Education

Robert Benchley '12, when he was an undergraduate, found the following question on an hour exam in a Gov course: "Discuss the Northern Fisheries case from the point of view of the important question of international law." Benchley was not prepared, having been out on a Lampoon binge the night before, and started off his answer as follows: "I should like to discuss this case from a new angle--namely, from the point of view of the fish."

We are Indebted to Dean Hanford for reviving this old story to emphasize that the General Education Report must be discussed from the point of view of the student. So far this term, most Harvard students have been pretty apathetic about the General Education proposals, and consequently a lot of people are running around with their heads full of misconceptions about the whole thing.

Dean Hanford and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have had to rely on some reports prepared by committees of the Student Council in years past to discover what students think about education. The Undergraduate Organizational Committee on the General Education Report has stormed against "the apparent disregard of student opinion" shown by the Dean's office and the Faculty in its consideration of the General Education proposals--but the whole thing has been something of a tempest in a teapot.

Without purposing to weaken the position of the Undergraduate Committee, in which the undergraduate editors of the SERVICE NEWS are represented, it should be said that the old Student Council reports were the only guides to student opinion the Faculty had, in the absence of any more current statement, and that these much-touted reports represent more thoughtful and concerted studies than any present group of students has seen fit or found time to pursue.

Under the impression, which the Undergraduate Committee has not really contested, that the Council reports were authentic exhibits of student opinion, the University "Objectives" Committee adopted a great many of the ideas first evolved in those reports into their report, "General Education in a Free Society."

There are four of these Council committee reports relevant to the controversy over General Education that should be raging. The first of the four, the 1931 report, discussed only the tutorial system, recommending that assigning tutors to men with permanent positions rather than placing the entire burden of tutorial on the shoulders of younger men would increase the efficiency of the system.

The '39 report, by far the most comprehensive of the four, noted that "the 1931 Committee was able to take as an unwritten premise . . . that the tutorial system was a permanent institution at Harvard. . . . Today no one could safely make a tacit assumption that tutorial is here to stay. There is a widespread feeling, among students and among faculty members, that it is disintegrating."

Two major reasons were cited for this disintegration: ". . . the pressure of other obligations on the teaching staff . . . prevents them from taking a sufficient amount of time and interest in tutorial instruction;" ". . . tutorial has never been integrated into the requirements for a college degree."

The 1940 report, which went along with and specifically enlarged upon the '39 report's recommendation of compulsory introductory area courses, neglected the tutorial question. The '42 report, entitled "Necessary Elements of a Liberal Education," expanded on the fish's--or student's--point of view on tutorial.

Tutorial 'Competes' With Courses

"A major difficulty that confronts both tutors and students at present is that a vaguely defined tutorial objective is in competition with graded courses. Naturally, the student will devote whatever proportion of his effort he thinks necessary to getting the highest possible marks before he concerns himself with tutorial. Yet since the whole value of tutorial as a special method of instruction lies in its flexibility and in the avoidance of marked quizzes and exams, we must not convert it into another course by applying course ratings.

"Some way must be found," was the lame conclusion of 1942, "to make tutorial equal in value with the work of any given course without destroying the tutorial method. This means . . . giving the tutor the sense that the quality of his tutorial instruction is as important to his personal future as the quality of his research; and . . . giving to the student the feeling that his education would be incomplete without tutorial." The '39 conclusions were more specific.

Since it is one of the major points still undecided by the Faculty, the tutorial problem will have a major place in the considerations of the Undergraduate Committee on the General Education Report, which is challenged by the 27 page '31 Council report and succeeding analyses to present an up-to-date statement of representative student opinion on tutorial.

For its examination of the contents of the proposed general education courses, the Committee may refer to the detailed plans drawn up in the 1940 Council report. In any event, the present Committee will probably have to lean, to a great extent, on the reports it has, by implication, thus far scorned. The authors of those reports worked, without $60,000, nearly as hard as the University Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society.