STATUESQUE, BUT IMMORAL

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Ye gods--Hum I sounds like a disaster! Somehow the faculty has managed to combine all the worst features of Gen Ed courses without even a token inclusion of its virtues.

Don't get me wrong: My lower level Gen Ed courses were undoubtedly the best courses I have taken here. They were Hum 6, Nat Sci 5, and Soc Sci 2. They all taught a method, a discipline. They opened up new worlds. All of them blatantly ignored other people's conceptions of what should be taught in an introductory literature course, history or sociology course, biology course; and wound up by transcending these outworn labels. And each was the brainchild of a professor (and his disciples) who was teaching his personal idea all year long, and with much love. It's hard to say what we learned is the way of information (although that was there too)--but it is immediately obvious that these courses lived up to the highest ideal of education.

Now take Hum 1. Highlights in the History of Man--all those books you really should read--glances at great thoughts--a page or two of Plato--and all those venerable professors filling through benevolently, like a bunch of pompous angels. It's just too much! The White Man's Burden is as immoral idea! History is not a row of statues!

I'm sorry to get se excited. It just makes me sad to think of all those innocent freshmen spending their sweet-smelling mornings in Humanities 1, discussing and evaluating God is Western Civilization for an four and a half when they are through. Harvard and General Education and do so much more. Iris Shulman '65