QUALIFIED APPRECIATION

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The Student Council General Education Committee appreciates your coverage of our recent report and recognizes the necessity of your having to condense it in treating it. But we would like to correct a few errors regarding those parts that you did cover. We do not intend to debate or comment on your own convictions regarding G.E.; our arguments are in the report.

The main reason we recommend at least one more course in the Humanities and the Social Sciences is not, as you suggest in your first editorial, that the sections are too big, but that the lectures and the courses themselves are too big.

We did not mean to imply, as suggested in your third editorial, that all the faults of G.E. are "ones of administration and teaching;" we do state that General Education cannot succeed if the students are unresponsive.

In your third editorial you imply that we base our recommendation regarding the number of elementary courses that should be required solely on the opinions expressed in our student questionnaire. Student opinion is certainly relevant, and it may be that more students will prefer three courses as the courses improve. It is also true, as we state, that student opinion will be more relevant when the views of those who have been required to take three courses are known. But in addition to student opinion, there are other bases of our recommendation. The elementary Natural Science courses appear to be rather easy for Natural Science majors and pre-medical students. And, more important, many students may now fill their Natural Science requirement by taking two lab courses and a math course, or three lab courses, in their first two years. It would appear, therefore, that Natural Science courses are not absolutely essential for these people; if this is true, it seems inconsistent to require concentrators in the other two areas to take a G.E. course in their area. But the G.E. courses outside the student's area would still be essential. What we recommend, then, is this: The present program should be continued for a trial period, and if these tendencies persist, only two lower level G.E. courses, in the two areas outside the student's area, should be required. Robert Cole, Chairman   General Education Committee,   Harvard Student Council

The reference to unresponsiveness comprised two lines in the Council's seventy-page report, and they seemed to carry proportionate weight. Even had the idea loomed larger in the Council's conclusions, student response depends to a great extent on the teaching and content of a course.

Second, it is all very well for the Faculty Committee on G.E. to be lenient in the case of Science majors, but in a Report whose authors assume the eventual success of the program, conclusions based on this leniency seem, as was pointed out in the third editorial, out of place.