The G.E. Report: I

What with charts, tabulations, percentages, and frequent passages of intricate reasoning, the Student Council's review of General Education at Harvard in no easy report to wade through. Yet although its prose may be of the grimmest variety, its conclusions and recommendations make it one of the best Council reports in several years.

The basis for the Report is the results of a long poll, sent to 674 sophomores, juniors and seniors, which received a seventy-five percent response. This, the only method open to the Council in its investigation, has two serious limitations which must be mentioned before discussing the Council's conclusions. First, if the questions are to be useful, they must probe far deeper than the usual Do you think such-and-such is 1)good 2)bad (3) type of questionnaire. The resulting questions, such as how much has G.E. "improved your ability in dealing with problems effectively and critically...?" are enough to tax even the most sensitive and perceptive student, and his decision must be considered as partly guesswork. Second, many of those asked for information had to draw deeply on memories of courses long since completed.

Although these considerations deprive the Report of any claim to complete irrefutability-a claim which the Council does not make-only one with the gloomiest opinion of undergraduates' memories and abilities to appraise could totally discredit the Council's conclusions on these grounds.

The Report subdivides most easily into three sections, one analyzing the methods of teaching G.E. courses, the second measuring the Program's effectiveness against its aims, and the third discussing the number of G.E. courses that should be required of students. Each of these sections will be considered in separate editorials.

The first section, that on teaching methods, consists of the views of lectures, section men, and students on what the courses' various components contribute toward fulfilling the purposes of General Education. From the instructors' point of view, the lecturer's task is unifying his course, focusing attention on its central problems, and in general guiding the students along the desired line of thought. Sections were credited with a crucial role, that of goading students into using the facts and considerations acquired from lectures and readings in class discussions. Full participation in such discussion is considered all the more important because General Education's fare supposedly consists mostly of ideas, problems, and values. Essays shared this importance, as they too are a means of stimulating original thought.

These opinions serve as a standard, against which the Council measured students' evaluations of G.E. sections, lectures, essays, and reading. The contrast between ideal and actuality, a disappointingly striking one, is the basis for the first section's three recommendations.

We recommend ... that so far as possible, papers in G.E. be designed to relate what a student has learned to his own experience. Backed up by examples and instructors' comments, this includes a suggestion that no maximum length be set for essays. The recommendation is based first on the poll, which indicated that students considered papers of small interest and of less importance toward understanding the courses. Beyond this, it rests on the assumption that essays can be as worthwhile as many instructors claim. There is no refuting the statistic's importance; if papers do not help students understand a course, they are valueless. But it is clear that essays afford opportunities for thorough research and original thought, and that their failure indicates poor administration. If papers are assigned thick and fast, and if their topics do not require more than a regurgitation of facts, they are bound to be inconsequential. The Council Report applied the same reasoning to courses which assign so many books that none could be given the careful consideration they deserve.

At least one more lower level course is needed in the Social Sciences and the Humanities... These courses should be regularly given... This is the Council Report's answer to the fact that only twelve percent of those polled considered sections the most important part of their courses. Section men, who considered the sections vital, claim that the most efficient size a group could be is from fifteen to twenty-five. In all areas but Natural Science, which offers five courses, the increasing size of the courses have made the maintenance of this ideal number difficult. By increasing the number of available courses in the Social Sciences and the Humanities to five, thus reducing the number of people in each course, the Report hopes to remedy the overcrowding. While this is a rather remote solution to the problem posed by the students' poor opinion of sections, it still has some merit.

We recommend that regular, informal seminars ... including the section men and the lecturer be initiated in the G.E. courses. The worth of training section men for their duties, as well as he necessity of selecting the best instructors possible for section posts, is self-explanatory.

So much, then, for the first section's conclusions and recommendations; except for the limitations of the poll method of research, they are all but iron-clad. They illustrate lacks in General Education which, if allowed to continue, might seriously harm the program, and we hope that the Faculty Committee on General Education will see fit to act on them. The second section of the Report, which will be considered tomorrow, serves to add even more urgency to the Report's proposals.