Mutilated Rules

The business of language requirements, treated last Saturday in a CRIMSON editorial, has kept the Faculty in a lather for the past fifty years. Some people want all such things abolished. Others prefer to require a little exposure, and a few wish to engulf the hapless undergraduate altogether.

Under the proposal in the CRIMSON's editorial of last week, candidates for an A.B. degree must not only master a foreign language, but imbibe a foreign culture in quantity sufficient to have lasting effects. The intoxication this would cause, would, in my opinion, do no good and great harm.

For one thing, such a requirement would willy-nilly herd students into a course many of them would not like. Far from being an antidote, this sort of compulsion only makes indifference more resolute, evasion more determined. In addition, weak enthusiasms, which presumably the Faculty wishes to strengthen, have a way o dying under such paternal rigor. Only those interested at the start would be sure to apply themselves enough to learn anything permanently and they would probably take the courses anyway. The Faculty has braved this facet of haman nature but once within my memory, in setting up General Education. Surely, G. E. is interesting and fruitful enough to warrant taking the risk. Language courses are not.

Secondly, the CRIMSON's editorial tossed the word "culture" about as if it meant something. Alone, it does not. Is culture a matter of touching off the Yule log, or does it involve institutions, thoughts and habits? Or perhaps, as used last Saturday, it is just a vehicle for teaching a language, a context for declensions, If the Faculty decided to foster a culture courses, it would have to deal with this question from the very beginning.

Finally, such as move would add on more required course, further restricting the undergraduate's leeway in choosing his own educational path. It would be especially arduous on those who had to take a required course in Ouvrez la fenetre because they had not taken enough French in high school. The idea expressed in the CRIMSON's editorial that the College could force schools to give three years of modern languages by denying entrance to students not so prepared it illusory, as all the Deans in Harvard College will attest. such a unilateral rule would only deprive Harvard of desirable scholars.

A Course Need

All this leaves a required language-culture program fairly well mangled, as indeed it should be. There is a line to tread between a requirement so lax that it is useless and one so tough it gobbles up a disproportionate share of the students' time. What is needed is an elementary course sufficiently well-taught to arouse or sustain interest in its subject, and though enough to give the ignorant something on which they can build further if they should wish to build.

This is essentially the General Education policy writ small: by presenting topics which occupy teachers in the Social and Natural Sciences and the Humanities to freshmen, the Faculty hopes to stimulate more undergraduates to individual work on those subjects. It does not require students to digest whole fields of knowledge. Surely this is a suitable rationale for the language requirement.

The current rule seems adequate for this purpose in all respects but one: quality of instruction. How bad the teaching is I don't pretend to know--the constant complaints may be more the results of compulsion than anything else. In any case, a required course should be better taught than others, else it would be wholly useless. Perhaps if the Faculty devoted less time to figuring out what the language rule was meant to accomplish and more to making the courses superbly taught, something besides an endless round of aimless revisions would come from the next fifty years of contention.