Rollins System of Education Places the Initiative of Study in Hands of Student and Abolishes All Lectures

The following article on the Rollins plan of education was written especially for the Crimson by Hamilton Holt, President of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

Humorously, though at the same time mournfully, Woodrow Wilson used to quote the professor who declared, after long acquaintance with undergraduates at an ancient and particularly famous university, "The human mind possesses infinite resources for resisting the introduction of knowledge."

That had been Mr. Wilson's observation also, and he once remarked, "I have spent the greater part of my life doing what is called teaching, but many of the pupils of most of our universities systematically resist being taught. If I had anything that I thought was worth their hearing I should love to address a body of people hungry to learn. I have never done it yet. It would be a very novel experience."

Perhaps eventually one or another of our ambitious new psychiatric foundations--the Institute for Child Guidance, conceivably--will look into this and report that what ails the rebellious student (less at Harvard than at many other universities) resembles only too closely what ails the majority of us. That complex! Inferiority!

In his tenderest freshmanhood it develops, nor ought we to affect surprise. Almost everything about the usual university works toward making him feel small; instead of seeing an establishment got up for him and ingratiatingly placed at his disposal, it appears rather to delight in minimizing his importance--with the natural result. Dwindling in his own eyes, he reasserts himself, though that is at first a bit difficult. He cannot subtract one cubit from the stature of those collegiate halls whose very size and costliness and grandeur overawe and humiliate him. He cannot lighten by so much as an ounce the pressure of undergraduate opinion, which, finding him not only insignificant but at numerous points objectionable, sets out to work him over into conformity with standard design. But the professors, who have somehow an air of owning the institution and owning him--those, at least, he can defy.

Sometimes with blandishments, sometimes with academic Baumes Law, academic Jones Laws, and the like, the universities keep multiplying their mainly futile attempts to dissolve or break down his resistance. At Rollins College we abolish the motive for it. This we accomplish by prohibiting recitations, prohibiting lectures, and to a large extent making the professors the servants, rather than the masters, of the students. Though a fine sense of bigness results from defying a master, what possible exhilaration is there in defying a servant?

Radical Measures

These are radical measures--especially the measure that prohibits recitations. But--frankly, seriously--why is a recitation? Why indeed? If anything is to be taught, the student should question the teacher, not the teacher the student. The time when the student needs a teacher is not after he has got or failed to get his lesson but when he is studying.

Besides, the recitation is too commonly a rather farcial affair, and, as a recent writer puts it, Rollins College has "wanted to get away from the method under which the class room becomes a sort of criminal court, where the teacher--as judge, prosecutor, and detective--attempts to find out, often unsuccessfully, whether or not the student has mastered his lesson, and the student is mainly interested in creating a good impression, by bluffing or otherwise." More than any other single factor, the recitation is responsible for the definition, Student: one who does not study.

A Difficult Task

In point of stupidity, the usual college lecture ranks next to the recitation. Lecturers are rare, particularly among lecturers, just as teachers are rare particularly among teachers. To staff a college with teachers who can teach is difficult enough. To staff a college with teachers who can teach by lecturing is all but downright impossible. If you have a number of such teachers at Harvard, how many institutions share Harvard's good fortune?

I am not alone in my disgust with the usual college lecture. A veteran educator suggests that no professor be allowed to lecture until he has proved that he can bill a town, pack a hall, and satisfy people who have paid good money to hear him hold forth. A student at a famous Mid-Western university describes the lecture system as "that process by which the contents of the professor's notebook are transferred by means of the fountain pen to the student's notebook without passing through the mind of either," and recently Mr. H.G. Wells declared. "There is no need whatever for any one ever to suffer or inflict an ordinary course of lectures again."

The Journalists' Method

I suppose that my low opinion of the recitation system and the lecture system is a result chiefly of my experience with them both in my student days, but the impression then made was reinforced later on by my experience as a journalist, and a journalist is a student, habitually out for information. He will hunt for it in every other conceivable place rather than beg admittance to the room where that very information is being recited by students or where that very information is being dispensed by possibly the ablest of college lecturers. The journalist will dig in his own "morgue", his own library, make luncheon appointments with fellows rated as authorities, exploit the Reader's Guide, perhaps take a trip to see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears, and, if he runs to the professor in the end, it will not be to sit out a recitation or lecture, it will be to pump him, principally to check up on material previously gathered or to obtain a shrewder, more matured and balanced interpretation of it.

The journalist's method, I found, was a better one, educationally, than the traditional college method. The undergraduate quickly forgets. The journalist remembers. The things that he has learned by going out after them on his own become a permanent possession.

How, then, was the journalist's method to be introduced in a college? At Harvard, you have introduced it, though to a very limited extent, by establishing the Reading Period. At Rollins we have made it the one and only method by establishing what we call the two-hours conference system. A group of students work together for two hours at a stretch. The material is at hand. They dig into it on their own. Nobody can avoid digging in as he would avoid preparing for a recitation. There is nothing else to do. Then, when the study portion of the period is over, the students discuss what they have managed to find out. All through the two hours, a professor sits by. Not to see that the students work (there is no need of that) and not to meddle with them while they work. He is there merely to help out anybody who gets stuck, and, during the discussion that follows study, serve as a kind of moderator. When occasion arises, students consult his opinion. Even then, he talks with, instead of at, the students.

Plan is Succeeding

The Rollins Plan appears to be succeeding. Says a Rollins undergraduate: "It has taught me to think." Says another: "How fine to work for one's friend--not one's boss!" Says a third: "We feel here that the college really wants to put itself at the disposal of the student rather than merely to subject him to a course of sprouts." Says a Rollins professor: "Instead of being on the defensive and trying to escape work, most of my students are anxious for it. The initiative is with them, now, and they take it. Instead of prodding them, all I need do is to help."

Rex Beach, president of our Alumni Association, sees in the two-hour conference system a harking back to good old Twelfth Century practice. The more I consider the Twelfth Century and the origin of universities during that century, the more I am inclined to agree with Rex Beach. At the original universities there were no recitations. There were no lectures. Naturally, for there were no professors. But when professors began to evolve, it was not as conductors of recitations or as lecturers, it was as friends and helpers of the students.

Foundation of Universities

A university got its start in this way: first there was a row of books, usually belonging to a nobleman or rich merchant: next, there was a clique of young men who had obtained his permission to walk in and read the books and also his permission to copy them: then, as the news spread, scores, hundreds and even thousands of young men came pouring in from other cities, all ambitious after learning: by that time, the early comers had got well on in their study of the books and could help out beginners. Later on, helping out beginners became a recognized trade, and the world witnessed the emergence of the first professors.

At Paris, the professors organized, and virtually owned the students. At Bologna, however, the students organized, and virtually owned the professors. Each new professor was forced to put up a bond--in cash--when appointed, and he was appointed by the students' chief official, himself a student. At the end of the year the professor received his money back, with deductions for bad behavior--such, for instance, as coming late to class, or skipping a chapter, or failing to finish the course within the time agreed upon. Throughout the year, he was required to sweep the classroom and keep its windows mended!

Underlying Principle

Now, I am free to confess that in the treatment of professors at Rollins College we do not carry out this Twelfth Century program anything like completely, but its underlying idea--namely that professors are made for the students, not students for the professors--is likewise the idea at Rollins.

I confess, moreover, that the introduction and maintenance of the two-hours conference system has been far from easy. It presupposes a very unusual type of professor--the sympathetic, lovable type, whom students will recognize instantly as a friend. A Phi Beta Kappa key, a Ph. D., an aptitude for research, and the authorship of half a dozen, text-books may be sufficient to qualify a man for a professorship at the ordinary college, but not at Rollins. I never call a man to Rollins unless, beyond all this, former students of his tell me that he is a human being. Try to staff a college with professors of that type, and you will find that you have your hands full. Succeed, and you will still have your hands full, for it is the hardest thing in the world to convince even the best professors that they teach most effectively when they teach with their mouths shut.

College Life

Meanwhile, the two-hours conference system, with four two-hours periods a day, involves heavy work for the student. Nobody can loaf. Nobody can shirk. Nobody can bluff. However, the two-hours conference system has not scared away students from Rollins, widely advertised though that system has been. This year's enrollment shows a twenty per cent increase, and we have a waiting list.

Neither has the system tended to diminish the jollity of college life. If anything, it has increased it. They say in the Navy, "A strict ship is a happy ship", and a student at Rollins soon discovers that the definitely required study periods, with their inescapable exactments, leave him at liberty to enjoy to the full what remains of his waking hours. In his recreation, he is never haunted by the thought, "Hang it! I'm fooling away time when I ought to be studying.