THE STUDENT'S VIEW

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Since thanks to Mr. Brumm for his letter in the Saturday. April 27 CRIMSON. Not that one can expect this to lead to a general second look at the college--have not the officers and faculty with a few notable exceptions shown the most trusting undergraduate that they have little real that someone is on our side, someone naive enough in these days to take the motto "Veritas" literally.

Fifteen years ago a group of students wrote a remarkably cogent and even-tempered critique of Harvard education entitled Harvard Education 1948, The Students' View, a student council report available in the Dunster House library and possibly elsewhere. Three extracts, although slightly vague when presented out of context, will show its tenor:

Despite the universal dependence on the lecture system, the real keynotes to education--learning to think, learning to read, and learning to work efficiently in groups--are aims that are achieved less in the lectures than anywhere else.

Education, we say, must stress individuality, but by this we mean something quite different from the concept of privacy and withdrawal, which in fact is but a pleasant term for what should more accurately be called "atomism."

We believe that the myth of Harvard indifference has been carefully maintained as a defense against a system which offers little chance for the undergraduates to direct the course of their activities in areas which are of real interest to them. We believe likewise that the faculty, and many of the students, have seriously misread this symptom, and have not taken pains to try to understand why such apthy is so prevalent in a place which normally should hold so much of interest to the men living here.

It should be shocking to realize that each of these criticisms applies all to well today. perhaps the absence of progress explains our reluctance to discuss the issues publicly any more (witness the concerns of the CRIMSON this semester). When students do speak they seem to produce monsters, as, for example, the February Preliminary Report of the Committee on Educational Policy to the HCUA (unless I am fooled and this vulgarity was meant as a satire). Some will say that all this is not the student's job. It should not have to be.

But if our elders find more interesting subjects in this multiuniversity than us, they still have an opportunity to improve matters without much effort. following Mr. Brumm's hint I would suggest a rewriting of the fascinating pamphlet, Information About Harvard College for Prospective Students. One could omit the sections dealing with a Liberal Education in a University College; strike out such passages as, "This is individual and therefore expensive instruction. It cost is justified by the special educational values which accrue from it in a college which is strongly opposed to mass-production methods of education" (p. 24). One might more fully explain the meaning of such sentences as,"...there are in some fields a number of courses with 50 to 100 or more..." (p. 25), and altogether strive to give a more correct view of the College. This could have the felicitious result of halving or quartering the number of applications, and perhaps eventually even reducing the number of students. Such progress should gladden the hearts of all. David B. Garber '62-3