The Mail

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Student Council Committee on Education deserves credit for its latest report, which is in the spirit of the important Council reports of the thirties. Through such carefully prepared reports on education and life at Harvard the Council has made great contributions to the College. The reputation it acquired for these reports has not been wholly wrecked by its increasing political activity, and the present report will probably bolster up many people's flagging faith in the Council.

I gather that the report, fearing the impersonality of an education solely dependent on formal courses, objects to the decline of tutorial. This same objection was made a couple of years ago by another Council committee. Unfortunately, the fate of tutorial seems to be pretty well settled in the minds of the people who count. There is hardly any possibility tutorial will be revived. Many members of the faculty and administration, however, are aware that the lapse of tutorial leaves a discouraging void, and are receptive to practical suggestions for filling the void up.

The Council can perform a great service in the next few years if it would supplement this report by another, much more restricted report, outlining a specific program for preserving the advantages associated with tutorial. The aims of this program would be to enable students to develop working relationships with individual faculty members, and to encourage and guide independent work. Such a program would probably lean heavily on the Houses, which seem to be the only units small enough to deal with men out of the herd.

A Council report on this subject would be influential in proportion to its practicality and definiteness. Suggestions like "group tutorial" are of no use unless it can be shown exactly how group tutorial could be made effective at Harvard, and how group tutorial should be administered and set up, and at what cost. Lovin H. Campbell 1L