Integrating New England

The month which wanes tonight has verged on sheer poetry of line and hue and motion. Why doesn't Harvard College distill the riotous reds and gleaming golds, the crisp dawns and the slanting sunlight of swift-shrouding evenings.

Mr. Conant is a chemist. He should know from what test tube to conjure the formula that would preserve, diffuse and, for the average wayfarer in his hostelry, enrich the meaning of all this loveliness. Why not, from Mr. Conant's laboratory, a Harvard College course on New England? A course that would give the newcomer the feel of his temporary home, and with it, a microcosm against which to measure the world?

As of date, the alert neophyte can learn a little about his environment--if he is skilled at assembling jig-saw puzzles. If he has time for the more thoughtful courses in history, literature, and the fine arts, he will not clude Sam Adams, nor West nor Bullfinch, nor the Mathers, nor Holmes, Thoreau and Emerson. If he leans toward economics, he will learn something about how New England makes its living. He may even get some visual education, as from the field trips which Professor Black promotes to the farms and forests of the region.

But it takes a man with a diversified course to win possession of the pieces of the puzzle, and to assemble them without guidance is to ask too much of his powers of integration. Browsings in Brattle Street, random windings on Beacon Hill and drives to Concord, Salem, Gloucester, Plymouth and points Capeward, even with the tutorial aid of the Massachusetts Guide Book, will not yield the rounded values which some systematic instruction would give him.

The problem of the educator is, above all, to touch, awaken, perhaps even transform the student. Proceeding from small things that can be seen and felt, to large things that can be dealt with only in abstraction, is one of the surest ways of igniting the diffident.

Why not a 1947-48 course on New England, commencing, in the flame of the autumn leaves, with an excursion to Walden where "the morning wind forever blows; the poem of creation is uninterrupted. . . ."?