THE LECTURE SYSTEM

Critical observers of the American educational scene have written volumes of comment, both harping and constructive. But the nub of their lengthy disquisitions was recently pointed out, all unwittingly, by a prominent education. His proud and thoughtless boast was roughly this, "the undergraduate of today covers the same ground as the Ph.D. of fifty years ago." He might well have added, for clarification, that in this process the undergraduate, like the Ph.D. candidate, is being prepared for worship in the great American Cathedral to Fact.

Succinctly, then, the charge is this: That American undergraduates, even Harvard undergraduates, are taught not to think, but to accumulate card catalogues. It would be stupid to maintain that no advance had been made, and to overlook the growth of tutorial and general examination systems. But it would be even more stupid to insist that all is well. It is reasonably obvious that the cornerstone of, for example, a Harvard man's A.B. resembles very closely a collection of fifteen course grades; and it is certainly obvious to observers that those grades are acquired not through the medium of substantial thought, but through a memorization of data.

The burden of this criticism must be shouldered by a lecture system which operates on the theory that students are constitutionally incapable of absorbing facts from books, and that a Professor must therefore deliver two or three lectures a week in the effort to bolster up whatever opinions he may have with a body of elementary fact. For evidence that the result is horrid, one need only look to such courses as Government 1, History 11, English 28. One might continue; but a typical list would fill a column. Compelled by regulation, and by a false notion of undergraduate capacity, the speaker fills up his thirty of forty lectures a year with text book material, has little opportunity to display the wares of his thought, and counts the year well spent if he write part of another book.

Last year, the CRIMSON suggested that perhaps this situation was not ideal, that it might be improved by a reduction in the number of lectures and by an increase in reading lists. It was proposed that fifteen lectures, delivered during the closing weeks of the term would serve a double purpose: such a system would relieve professors of the onus which attends bi- and tri-weekly expositions, and it would give students an opportunity to observe whether anyone, professors net excluded, were able to assess intelligently a given body of information. Failure to adopt this suggestion will by no means be fatal; but it will insure a continuation of a major bane of American education, "the transfer of material from the professor's notebook to the student's without its passing through the mind of either.