Freshman Education

In the past, the academic side of freshman year has proved challenging to many students but impersonal and boring to as many others. To the one eighth of the class of '63 who will participate in one or two of the new freshman seminars, the academic experience involved could prove one of their most fruitful at Harvard.

Together with the honors tutorial program initiated last year for juniors, the new seminar system represents the University's most promising educational development since the advent of General Education more than a decade ago. Both last year's and this year's innovations move Harvard education beyond the predominant, formal course system, which can often stunt intellectual interest by Procrustean requirements.

Undoubtedly, with the number of undergraduates at the College, the lecture and course system will remain the basis of the curriculum. Lectures have some great advantages; the principal one is that they present the "great men" of the faculty to a large number of undergraduates. A diet of lectures alone, however, can lead to intellectual sluggishness. Freshmen have had General Education A to give them the experience of a discussion course, but the majority of Gen. Ed. A classes (the honors sections are notable exceptions) can prove puerile and stultifying.

The seminars or workshops are designed to allow freshmen to follow individual interests as much as possible and simultaneously to challenge them into rigorous study--in short to communicate the "excitement" of learning.

This year certainly, perhaps the next five years, will be a time of testing for the program. Revisions may have to be made, for some of the present seminars may never escape beyond a desultory pursuit of some dilettantish goal, whereas others may be too specialized (for example those on sunspots or German historical thinking since 1945) and encourage freshmen to enter a cozy academic niche prematurely.

Freshmen will find this conflict between surveying and specializing omnipresent throughout the University. The idea of general education, of grounding the student in certain fundamental problems of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences is basically a healthy one; and the seminar program should attempt to remedy the deficiences in method rather than change the basic objectives of the general education system. The goal of general education--to have an idea of the forest as well as the trees, to pursue a concentration and view it in the perspective of the fundamental areas of learning--is a valid one. And the seminars can help remedy the defects of the lecture system, which so often does not accomplish this goal.

This is not to say that each seminar should be a little gen. ed. course, but it does mean that initial over-specialization may lead freshmen to ignore the momentous questions latent in any study. A seminar in history, for example, offers a wonderful opportunity to work by case study to the problems of moral judgment, freedom and determinism, while a seminar in sun spots, say, might be valuable not only for its intrinsic material but as an introduction to scientific method and philosophy. It is to be hoped that the scholars who conduct specialized seminars will remember that the fundamental task of freshmen seminars is not to breed future graduate students but to communicate the root intellectual questions of their discipline in a personal and stimulating way.

Without experience it is impossible to know how centralized or how autonomous the program should be, how specialized or how general the individual workshops. Experiment is a necessity in this sort of venture. What has been established so far is a healthy beginning and should be continued and expanded, so that more than a privileged one eighth of a class will benefit.