The Tutorial System at Harvard

The interest displayed in the discussion about the development of the tutorial system of instruction in Harvard College leads the Bulletin to recite again and amplify some of the opinions it expressed a few weeks ago in an editorial on this subject.

The success of the tutorial system in English universities is primarily due to the fact that those institutions are subdivided into comparatively small groups, or colleges, where it is possible for a student to have much more intimate contact with his teachers than is the case here. . . . These college have grown up in England as the result of a divine accident and cannot very well be foisted ready-made upon an American university. Oxford and Cambridge, moreover, have not the complicated problems arising here out of the fact that graduate students--whose object should be the attainment of specialized knowledge--are taught in the same classes with undergraduates--whose aim should be the acquisition of intellectual power. The work of a tutor is infinitely more strenuous and exhausting than that of a lecturer; the fact that the academic year in Oxford and in Cambridge is of only six months duration is an indication of the strain to which the teaching force is put. A tutorial system is, moreover, extremely expensive; the tutors and the general examination in the Division of History, Government, and Economics cost Harvard University approximately $50,000 a year.

If England has much to teach us in regard to the possibilities of individual instruction, either singly or in small groups, we must not forget that our lecture system gives us certain advantages which Oxford and Cambridge lack and which we should be very foolish to abandont. Our aim should be to retain the strong points of what we already have, and combine them in so far as possible with the benefits to be derived from the English system. The Alumni Bulletin.