TUTORIAL SYSTEM NOT LIKE OXFORD, DECLARES EATON

Refuting the assumption that the Harvard tutorial system is eventually to approximate the Oxford and Cambridge systems, Assistant Professor R. M. Eaton, chairman of the Board of Tutors in Philosophy, in a statement to a CRIMSON representative declared yesterday that the lecture system must continue to bear the load of imparting information, while the tutor integrates this diverse material and aids the student in gaining an intelligent grasp of the whole field.

In Oxford the tutor must prepare his students for exacting examinations. In Harvard the tutor can presuppose that the student is acquiring in his courses sufficient information to pass his examinations, and is therefore free to humanize and to unify the student's grasp of his field.

Lectures Aid Tutor

Professor Eaton pointed out that the advance of the tutorial system depends upon the improvement, rather than upon the elimination of the lecture system, for only in this way can the student be given the detailed information upon which the tutor relies. Professor Eaton believes that a tutor is not intended to impart information, but to aid the student in giving verbal expression to his opinions upon the subject matter covered in courses, by which knowledge becomes an integral part of the student's mind, instead of a carefully catalogued list of facts.

Systems interdependent

Professor Eaton describes the tutorial and lecture systems as mutually interdependent, and would deplore the weakening of either. The pure lecture program gives the student only one form of expression for his ideas,--the written paper. The tutor cannot cover all the detail incidental to a full college course. The ideal solution is a combination of the two in which both written and verbal discussion of his field are available to the student.

Thesis Clarified By Tutor

"Under the system in force at the University before the tutorial system began," Professor Eaton said, "the student's final thesis represented a careful written exposition of his subject. Under the tutorial system, the thesis is discussed with the tutor before it is written, so that a verbal expression of ideas, with the consequent rounding of knowledge, precedes and shapes the written expression."

"To discover the individuality of the student, to find his main interests, and then to arouse an expression of those ideas by which knowledge becomes a living part of the students' mental fibre," concluded Professor Eaton, "is in substance my concept of the function of the tutor."