THE TROUBLE WITH HARV ARD

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The trouble with schools is that they are taught by people who know what other people should know. And the trouble with Harvard is that here teachers know better than anywhere else.

This is one reason why papers are bought rather than written, and why examinations are administered as though to a room full of criminals, whose primary intent is to cheat. It might be fun to write a term paper if one were interested in the topic, or at least in some topic. It might even be fun to take an examination if it dealt with something-anything- one wanted to know. The trouble is that when one is completely surrounded by experts on what one should know, hardly anything seems really worth knowing.

Let us remember that in the education of Harvard and Radcliffe students, the heavy hand of Harvard is preceded by twelve years of heavy-handed teaching of what one should know in order to get in. By the time most students come here, it has been years since they last thought about what they want or do not want to know, or about how they want or do not want to say it.

It is no accident that educational innovation at Harvard is a joke-that it concerns itself with which rule to substitute for which. Before we can have substantive changes. students will have to rethink how they got here. why they have come, where they want to go, and how they want to get there. When the students begin to take hold of their academic lives at least to the extent that they have of their domestic living arrangements, their education may begin to improve. Some of the faculty may be able to help, but they cannot (and should not) lead the way.