DUTY WHISPERS LOW....

It is a commonplace that there has been for the past few years at Harvard a tendency to reduce course requirements and to place academic responsibility upon the student without demanding too frequent accounts of his stewardship. But in the midst of this movement there still remain a few courses which, in their irritating insistence upon periodical reckonings, are out of step with the times. Such a one, for example, is History 12. Here quizzes of the type given Freshman sections in elementary courses follow one another at fortnightly intervals; when there is no quiz, there is a short paper to be written, or a map to be handed in. The course becomes only a series of mileposts to be passed as quickly and easily as possible.

And History 12 is only representative if a type of teaching still too common. The major harm of such a system of small duties to the professor is that they discourage thought. No forty-five minute quiz, no five page report offers a chance to think. The discharge of such duties resolves into a test of memory or an assembling of a number of encyclopaedic facts in order.

The theory behind the plan is that of extending into supposedly advanced courses the strict accountability which is needed in elementary survey courses. But this does not work; it is not fair, for example, to the Senior busy with a distinction thesis and the demands of divisionals to load him with small jobs which are wholly foreign to the type of thinking which he must do in his last college year.

There has been a good deal of talk about the freedom of the Harvard undergraduate to shift for himself intellectually, unsupervised except for the minimum of requirements. Behind this talk there has been much action that is courageous and liberal. But the College must go the whole way. There can be no halt-way measures, but they will exist as long as there exists the school of instruction which works out its effect in the pressure of insistent minor requirements.