THE WHOLESALE MEMORY SYSTEM

James Linn Weber, professor of English at the University of Chicago, who believes he has read and corrected enough composition papers to construct a great white highway from Princeton to New York, makes several interesting comments in the New Republic on the college undergraduate.

"Perhaps the most striking fact," says Mr. Weber, "in all these years of composition has been the docility of the students. Is the arrogance of youth' a meaningless phrase? I can count on my fingers the students who have rebelled against my criticisms. . . . . I wonder whether the same conditions prevail at Harvard or at Bryn Mawr? I know they do not in athletics."

Another educator applies a similar criticism to the research and graduate work done in American colleges. He finds that students doing more advanced work do not show the initiative and originality they should, and consequently are passive and docile in their thoughts. The reason given by this writer for such submissiveness of mind is to be found in the present system of wholesale memory work. Lecture notes and contents of books are learned for the occasion only and do not become a permanent mental possession to serve as a background for the more advanced work.

This same criticism can be registered with equal force against the undergraduate system of study. Too much memory work and too little independent thinking are facts that are readily observable. Only a few weeks ago Professor Channing urged his students not to take notes on outside reading but to grasp the essentials of the reading as they went along.

Our present system of learning lecture notes by heart, taking pages and pages of notes on outside reading to commit to memory, is futile, if that memorizing process is so mechanical that we forget all the facts after a quiz. Yet this is the system which is prevalent here at Harvard, and at other colleges throughout the country. With such methods of study there is little wonder that educators find their students submissively docile and without originality.