Tutorial System Successful in Achieving Its Aim, Says Tatlock

The following article was written by Professor J. S. Tatlock '96, professor of English at Harvard. It is reprinted from the monthly periodical of Ginn and Company, "What the Colleges Are Doing," and was published under the head "The New Frontier--At Harvard".

Instructed by lecture or recitation, the student is apt to feel that he has been told all that he needs to believe, or worse yet, to know, and to feel that he need know nothing else . . . The close relation with the tutor, and the operation side by side of the two sets of teachers, promote independence and a spirit of inquiry. If the tutor is the right kind of man, he also occupies somewhat the role of an older brother, when such a role is in place, helps the student solve the problems of college life and even, sometimes, of love affairs. The aim is to make the relation of tutor and tutored informal, human, and genial. While the former normally has an office in which he may meet his students if, he pleases, many tutors receive them at their rooms, or houses, and offer them such stimulus to geniality as tea and cigarettes (or so I hear). Several of the younger unmarried men are given free quarters in the senior dormitories, with the understanding that they should informally entertain at least once a week not only their own especial students, but other seniors.

The attempt to establish a human relation has succeeded so well that some directors or tutors even think the men spend more time with their students than they need to spend. The tutor who enjoys taking his ease in his inn naturally finds the students ready to spend much time in general chat. It is not so easy, when trying to cultivate a close relation, to cut interviews short. For instruction, the students are met singly or in small groups of those whose reading is much the same. The consultation is kept small enough to be of the nature of a private consultation, and not of a clinic, a method quite different from that of the ordinary classroom. . . .

Results Justify the System.

The system has been richly justified by its fruits. The profit, and even satisfaction, derived by the students from it is one of the most invigorating things which one sees on returning to Harvard after an absence of 22 years. They value the assistance of the tutors more and more as they advance from the Sophomore to the Senior year. This is partly, of course, as a source of counsel and ghostly strength as the general examinations approach. To the Sophomore, these examinations seem merely one far-off, diabolical event; to the Senior, they seem imminent and awful. All students take their work with their tutors more and more seriously, but it would be a great mistake, as has been intimated, to suppose that the only, or chief, function of the tutor is merly to prepare for these examinations.

He rouses students, if they are rousable, to a very large amount of purely disinterested reading. In the Junior year for example, an English tutor will put men through a course in nineteenth century prose with no special bearing on the examinations. One energetic tutor last year reported that in the first two months and a half of the year a Sophomore read, outside his regular class work, and discussed with his tutor, 13 plays, two long poems, and one long novel, most of these being comparatively recent (not ephemeral) and not bearing particularly on the general examinations, work which must have required an hour or two of reading daily. So great is the stimulus that good Seniors develop a grasp and peise and intellectual initiative which advanced graduate students ought to have but often have not. . . . Partly owing, no doubt, to other causes, one notices a great diminution in pose, affectation, trivialty, merely superficial cleverness, airlness, a change which is visible in college journalism.