The Open Curriculum

Unfortunately for both Harvard and the General Education program, little is likely to come of Professor Murdock's recent expression of interest in Advanced Placement exams to exempt students from General Education courses. The compromise between "liberal education" and a modified distribution requirement which is the foundation of the General Education program is so uneasy that any attempt to disturb it will encounter opposition from some quarter, and any sort of exemption would require a revision of basic philosophy.

Nevertheless, the suggestion is significant and worth serious consideration. It would help realize some of the program's oldest aims, and might well provoke a much-needed look at the real objectives of General Education.

The immediate difficulty is the actual process of exemption. Harvard's program is unique, and it would be virtually impossible to get a national testing program. The tests would have to be written, administered, and graded by the General Education Committee or the Advanced Placement Office, and neither would especially relish the job.

But there is a problem of policy which will probably prevent the solution of the mechanical difficulties: a large group connected with General Education feels that the program is really a three-course venture into liberal education, and that to issue an exemption because a student had once had other liberal education would be ridiculous.

The fundamental question, therefore, is whether compulsory "liberal" education should be part of the Harvard curriculum. Concentration has long been a part of the College, not as a necessary evil, but a positive good; to make General Education the first step in the creation of a liberal arts college, or even a compromise with that end would be a radical and undesirable change. Rather, General Education should be what it was designed to be: a liberalized distribution program which recognizes that its participants will never study the areas of human knowledge in toto, and tries to impart a general understanding of them.

As Professor Murdock has pointed out, the "redbook"--General Education in a Free Society--on which the General Education Program was founded, said that the proper place of such instruction would ideally be in the schools. The situation has not changed in this respect, despite thirteen years, and it might be wise to try letting the schools fulfill their job. If sixty students come in with sufficient preparation to become sophomores, it does not seem unlikely that quite a few students have studied enough in one area to gain placement into more advanced courses in that area than the elementary level General Education courses.

For impressive reasons the General Education program has consistently refused to systematize its concessions to the well-prepared or the student with special plans. With the exception of the long-standing Nat Sci exemption, the requirement has no provision for unusual cases. No doubt the reasons are always good, but the cumulative effect is inevitably disquieting. The isolation and stasis which seems to be infiltrating the program are discouraging signs; nothing could be further from either liberal or General Education than a compartmentalized offering of three courses which refuses to integrate itself with the rest of the College.

The case for General Education exemptions is similar to that for the Advanced Placement program itself. With exemption students can fulfill a distribution requirement with courses which interest them, courses which fall into their specific fields of interest; without this freedom, they must simply take one more elementary level course. There is limited time at Harvard, and it would seem both fair and wise to free a little more of it for the student's own choice when he has fulfilled a requirement such as that in General Education.

The difficulties of testing are an obstacle, but they should not be made an excuse for doing nothing.