FOR CIVILIZED AMERICANS

When professors and counsellors meet this week to settle the fate of the American History Plan they can take the easy way out by agreeing to muddle along for another year, or perhaps for four years, as Professor Jones has suggested. But the Plan's California angels are not going to continue shelling out twenty-five thousand dollars a year if no concrete results can be shown before 1942. The History Program must be oriented in one of two opposite directions: into the formal curriculum, or into a new realm of extra-curricular education.

A half-course in American civilization would probably attract a large number of students. Laboratory men, now too busy for extra-curricular history, might well fit a half-course into their distribution schedules. As a course it could be a new departure in Harvard education, with emphasis on personal contact, small groups, informality, and with less stress on examinations. On the other side it may be argued that the giving of course credit would not necessarily increase participation. Moreover, an experimental course faces the real danger of becoming a notorious snap, particularly if formal check-ups are minimized. And the very incorporation into the curriculum might at the outset kill any experimentation with the slow poison of required reading lists and hour exams.

A continuation of the Plan on an extra-curricular basis also has its drawbacks. It may reach only a handful of students each year. And it will inevitably face stiff competition from other activities. On the other hand here is a chance for a new technique in teaching, freed from marking, credits, and formal sanctions. The increasing participation in the Program during this year augurs well for the future.

A realistic solution of this dilemma would mean a compromise between numbers and the ideal of extra-curricular learning. If President Conant is still anxious for large numbers of Harvard men to be bathed in America's past, let the Program catch the Freshmen as they enter the Yard, fresh and eager to try their intellectual wings. Let the farcical Bliss Prizes be abolished and the money be given for the best Freshman essays on some phase of American civilization. This year's successful tie-up with English A can be extended to other Freshman courses, and will undoubtedly draw a large group of Yardlings.

But for the upperclassmen let the Plan be an experiment in self-education. President Conant himself has said the student must "learn that formal instruction is no necessary part of the educational process." The study of American civilization is particularly fitted for such an experiment; in seeking behind his personal experience for the underlying forces that make American civilization, an undergraduate may learn that not all knowledge is to be found in textbooks, syllabi, and lecture notes.