COMING EVENTS

Even at this time, submerged as the student is with the final obituaries of his present courses and the preliminary salvos to those of the future, it is not too soon to cast one's eyes toward next year's experiment, an experiment which has fortunately received comparatively little attention from the popular press but one which, were all its consequences realized, is little less than revolutionary. The respite of classes which will take effect before midyear and final examinations in the college year 1927-1928, accepted by the majority of undergraduates under the vague head of "improvements" will in the not too distant future be brought to their attention as a factor in their not too distant future be brought to their attention as a factor in their education which has neither the etheriality of mere theory nor the abstractness of "another educational reform".

This respite, for which instructors are now planning and to that end regulating their lectures and reading lists, will be an experiment as much for the teacher as for the student, although its success depends, naturally, on the later. But professors are the first to be faced by the practical details of the plan. On their shoulders falls the burden of forming correct ratios of classroom work and, especially important since in it lies the efficacy of the plan, of proportioning the reading to be done during the weeks when there are no official meetings of courses.

The privilege of adopting or rejecting this respite has been left to the several departments; on that account some heads are seeking advice from their present classes as to whether or not the system seems to them, having taken the course--or at least being in at the death, advisable in the particular instance. Now there is nothing more difficult to obtain than helpful and intelligent criticism from those who are at the moment enmeshed in their own personal problems. Nevertheless students who have genuinely constructive opinions concerning their courses and who possess Platonic idealism which allows them to look upon the turmoil with some idea of objectivity, should not hesitate to proffer their views. Every undergraduate is, unfortunately, troubled with a certain inferiority complex in the question of pedagogy--pedagogy both theoretical and practical. In the matter under discussion, however, which tests every innovation instituted in the College in the last twenty years and which will constitute particularly a criterion as to the benefits of the much discussed tutorial system, every possible means of gathering information should be seized. Consequently those whom it most interests, those whom it will most affect, should regard it as a part of their personal welfare. There is no need for mock heroics just as there is no place for the purely destructive attitude. What may be looked upon in other places as but one more corruption of the old Germanic regime of higher education and as but a further opportunity to call forth a nonexistent student conscience is to those whose careers with which it is indissolubly connected an eminently practical problem, and one which can be solved only by the sincerest cooperation. That cooperation begins in the preparations for the respite--even before the period of its actual prevalence.