INSTRUCTION OR EDUCATION?

The drift away from the individual course as a unit in education appears in a recent action of the governing body of the Harvard Medical School. In the future, general examinations of a scope much broader than heretofore will be given at the end of the four-year course. The individual courses in the Medical School have always been longer than those at the College; the examinations have been fewer, and more men of high standing have been excused from taking them by reason of a high standard during the year. The step is therefore not as radical as was the corresponding step in the College; but it is significant.

In the heyday of the elective system it was possible for a man to graduate from college with a smattering of sixteen subjects and a grounding in none. More recently, without abandoning the ideal of a general education, we have swung toward concentration in a single subject and related subjects.

Emphasis on a field of study (as opposed to a course) tends to an individual system of education, with less assigned work and more voluntary work. Students at Harvard have long felt that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system of instruction. Whether the cause is a too definite prescription of work to be done, or lack of contact with the professors, or insufficient stimulation of originality, or the uninspiring personality of some section-men, many would-be students acquire late, or do not acquire at all, that absorption in their work which brings the greatest satisfaction. To this cause is due the remark common among graduates: "If I were going through again, I'd work harder," and the attitude common among undergraduates: "It isn't the things you learn in college, it's the friends you make, etc." Friends are a normal accompaniment of normal living; it cannot be denied that studies should be the main interest of a college man. The specialization of college athletics and the keenness of college competitions are results, not causes, of the lack of interest in studies. The contrast between the man who works because he is afraid of the weekly test and the man who works because he is interested is the contrast between the man who works for someone else and the man who works for himself. It is the contrast between instruction and education.