THE DUNSTER HOUSE FORUM

A group of tutors and undergraduates in Dunster House established several months age a House Forum which has proved effective in fostering the best type of education than many pretentious systems of examinations or course requirements. Although it has attracted less attention than various economic and historical societies in the House, the Forum is a less ordinary organization, and one of potentially greater influence.

At the Forum's bi-weekly meetings Professors McIlwain, Tozzer, Sorokin, and Matthiessen have been asked to defend their subjects as college disciplines, and their talks have usually led to vigorous debate. The one thing which the Forum has not done is to reach any settled conclusions as to the relative value of the fields of history, anthropology, or sociology. In its discussions, however, fundamental questions of ethics, art, and education have been raised. It is in putting these questions, in defining basic issues that the Forum has been of value.

It is a commonplace that the first step toward wisdom is a realization of the problems which anyone faces in trying to frame a philosophy. Until it has discovered those problems and asked the right questions, the mind ignores many relevant facts. It is an outstanding weakness in college instruction that it presents students with masses of facts without showing why the facts are important, without showing to what fundamental problems they are relevant. The Dunster House Forum is an excellent instrument for cantering attention on the basic difficulties of thought.

In addition to pointing out essential issues, whether in history, in literature, or in ethics, the Dunster House Forum has provided a rare occasion for valuable training in dialectic. Socratic dialectic is probably the most neglected mental discipline in the regular college course, and anything which encourages it is a useful stimulant of intellectual vigor.

The Forum is unfortunately not the sort of thing which can be reproduced wholesale. Its success has depended mainly on the interest of a few tutors and about twenty active undergraduates. It has to fight constantly a tendency to degenerate into an aimless tea party. Because of these difficulties, it would be futile to try to inaugurate similar groups in every House. On the other hand, the Forum has a real function other than those of an Economic Society or of the Liberal Club, and in other years such groups might well flourish in several Houses.