The Educational Plan

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Professor Morriman's discussion of the tutorial system on Thursday night made the goal seem both more desirable and more unobtainable. It was plain that the speaker, like every American who has been at Oxford and made a success there, felt keenly that no intellectual experience of his student life either at Harvard or in Europe has been as fine as his contact with his tutors at Baliol. The most justifiable kind of envy is the envy of a man caught in the machinery of one sort of educational mill for the chaps who are in another mill which he is perfectly certain has a better process than his own; better, that is, for him if he could have it, though perhaps it may not be absolutely any better than his own, or half as well suited to the needs of his community. The English tutorial system has been exciting such envy in several American colleges, and, for that matter, it excited the envy of an occasional liberal even in Germany before the war. Unfortunately its transplantation out of England seems impossible.

Any one who has studied in both British and American universities knows that, except with radical adaptations, it can never be brought into our colleges. Three things are necessary to it; small groups of men working together, instructors especially gifted for it and trained in it, and a conception of college study which makes every student an explorer in some big, general field of knowledge rather than a cub reporter in several simultaneous personally conducted tours in small corners of various fields. Small groups are more and more difficult to arrange in our huge, democratic colleges, and the number of college instructors in this country who have been in English universities or are able to imagine any substitute for the lecture system is very small indeed.

There is no doubt that in the junior and senior years at most of our big universities a certain proportion of the men become restive under the lecture system. This feeling is certain to grow and unless the colleges respond to it in some way their hold on the more intelligent men in America and on the intellectual life of the country is sure to weaken. Their already feeble resistance to technical education will become a rout. The trouble with the lecture system is that it keeps a chap at 21 or 22 working on his old prep school subjects of Literature, Mathematics, History and Natural Science in the prep school way. Daily assignments are designed to occupy all of his time and it is presumed that he is not capable of independent interests in them which are worth his serious attention. That is true, of course, of the "C" men, but it is most emphatically not true of the "A" and better "B" men. For them it means that in their last years their development in some important ways marks time, and the more intelligently and actively they work the more of an obstacle their classes become.

The upshot is that too many of the better men leave college without having become honestly interested and competent in any science or art. Instead of haying paddled their own canoes at leisure along respectable stretches of the scientific or humanistic rivers they know nothing about them except impressions caught from the suspension bridges on which they have been swung across the streams at intervals. The location of the bridges has depended on the builders. Of course, they are extremely well built. That is just the trouble with them. The view from them is obviously so much better than a man in a boat on the surface of the water below could get that it is hard to imagine that a person really interested in hydrography would do better to choose to spend his time alone in a boat. But it will not take a real scientist long to make the discovery, and when he does, sooner or later, he is sure to wreck those bridges, though he may have to resort to sabotage to do it. MERRITT Y. HUGHES 2G.