Report Appears Today On 'Harvard Education'

A 77-page critique of the "Harvard Education 1948," prepared by a special committee of the Student Council, will be released publicly this afternoon.

Prepared by a 52-man group under the direction of David C. Poskanzer '50, the report was one year in the making, and has been studied for the past four months by Dean Bender's committee on advising.

The report's central thesis is that "Harvard education has failed to recognize or to assess the implications of the basic problem of teacher-centered versus student-oriented education. It is the difference between viewing a college as an institution in which teachers teach as opposed to one in which students learn."

Lectures and Beer

In eleven chapters covering all methods of education, from "bull and beer sessions" to the lecture system, the Committee shows where it thinks the College has failed to provide a means for students to "interact with men about us, with faculty and fellow students."

Only through this interaction, the report states, "can we achieve the true intellectual individuation of educated men."

However, responsibility for improving the education rests both with the faculty and students, the Committee explains. Students must "educate themselves" to take part in the process of interaction.

Best remedy for the College's failings, the report states is a return to tutorial for more of the undergraduates. The committee pleads not for any specific tutorial plan, but rather for that "intangible quantity, the tutorial idea. . . . As an ideal we see it gradually slipping from view."

Hints for the Houses

Although tutorial is the best answer to the College's needs, well-run sections and "advisory functioning ideally" can also help. However, the Committee charges that sections too often degenerate into "miniature lectures or policing sessions," and states that unless students and teachers take a lively interest in the advising system, "it must fail miserably in accomplishing anything beyond what a trained secretary could do."

The Houses were once intended to promote undergraduate education, the report says, but "the role of the Houses . . . has come out of focus." Three ways in which the Houses can live up to their original purpose, the committee states, are 1) the creation of intimate discussion groups, with "six to ten men, a case of beer, and an instructor or two"; 2) teaching of courses right in the Houses; and 3) centering tutorial and advisory in the Houses.

Lecturers Criticized

The Committee said its polls of student opinion showed great dissatisfaction with the lecture system. "It is by definition a one-way process," the report states, whose "one justification . . . is that it permits many students to come under the spell . . . of a great teacher."

"We argue then that the lecture system stands or fails by the personality of the lecturer. . . . On the basis of student opinion, there are few lecturers at present who meet any such criterion."

GE No Panacea

In a chapter titled "General Education--A Complete Answer?," the report criticizes the Administration for concentrating too much on the content of GE and other courses. Instead the College must come to "reconsider the more basic questions of personnel and incentives to actual learning."

To gather student opinion for the report, the committee distributed about 200 questionnaires to students. The men were questioned on their own tutorial or advisory and also on their general views about the College.

At the same time other committee members interviewed faculty members, department heads, and members of the administration.

Authors of the report were William H. Bayliss '46, Allen Y. Davis '45, Kenneth W. Ford '48, Arnold Golodetz '48, James F. Hornig '50, Jerome J. Londinsky '48, Sumner M. Rosen '48, and Chairman Poskanzer