The G.E. Report: II

Perhaps the most important question considered in the Student Council Report on General Education is that of G.E.'s effectiveness as a system of learning. The Report approaches this as it approached the problem of teaching methods, by recording faculty members' conceptions of G.E.'s aims and comparing them with what students believe it is accomplishing.

Many are dubious of this approach, claiming that students' reactions are not adequate to guide the planning of so important a program, but this objection ignores the fact that G.E. must influence students to succeed. Regardless of how fine a program it seems or how profound the theory behind it is, it is worthless if it fails to produce in students the traits of mind which it is designed to produce.

The poll, which forms the basis for the Report's conclusions, investigated what students consider the objectives of General Education to be, how much they "improved" with respect to these aims and with respect to the aims outlined by General Education in a Free and faculty members, and what they think their lecturers and section men are trying to do. From the responses, the Report concludes that most students neither consistently the true purpose of General Education nor are improving in the way the program's authors and teachers expected they would.

He statistics and reasoning leading to these conclusions precise, rigorous, and well thought out, but one cannot help noticing that at the bottom of all this is an ingredient somewhat less convincing: the questionnaire itself. As pointed out in yesterday's editorial, and as recognized by the Report's authors, the poll's questions require some guesswork. The questions used for this section of the Report are by necessity even vaguer than those used in the section on teaching methods, for they refer to what goes on within students--changes which are difficult to perceive and even harder to distill into a phrase or two. This inevitably led to imprecise and qualified conclusions.

But however general, the Report's conclusions establish that General Education has serious trouble fulfilling its aims--so serious in fact that many undergraduates do not even understand what those aims are. Moreover they indicate that the fault lies in the program's administration; instructors seem to have permitted the line between General Education and the survey course type of learning to become blurred. The Report's statistics and reasoning are quite enough to show that the present G.E. program is not operating satisfactorily.

The Report adds one recommendation to those made in the section on teaching methods; instructors should use the case method of presentation more closely. This, with the proposals to revise essay assignments, to add a fifth course in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and to set up section man seminars, is a good beginning toward solving G.E.'s present problems.