General Education "Coddles" the Modern Student, Jones Claims

General Education, as practiced at Harvard and elsewhere, serves only to coddle or here the modern undergraduate and "prolong adolescence as far as it can be stretched," Howard Mumford Jones, professor of English, has declared.

Writing in the October issue of "The Atlantic," Jones argues for a return to the old free elective system and "the untrammeled right of the undergraduate to make his own mistakes." He concedes that the General Education program "produces bright, interchangeable students in quantity with almost no pain," but condemns the system as "a reduction in the classroom for average consumption of a certain average quantum of information about the behavior of Western Man."

Jones, who lectures in English 170, a history of American Literature, titled his article: "Undergraduates on Apron Strings."

Today's educational program is chiefly concerned, he contends, not with a student's education but with his "adjustment." "Intellectual adjustment begins as required courses for freshmen," Jones explains, where "instructors are hand-picked and, being selected, brood conscientiously over Great Books, The Development of Western Man, Humanism, and other well-meant exercises . . . Meanwhile those who are not average are bored."