Taylor Urges Curriculum Reforms, Political Activism at NSA Meeting

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.--Sweeping reform of college curriculums that are "now designed specifically to separate the student from the rest of society" is an urgent need, Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College, told a gathering of about 100 students at Smith College last weekend.

Delivering the keynote address at a New England regional conference of the National Student Association on the student's role in international affairs, Taylor charged that the student community has so far been totally unstimulated by its education and therefore fails to make an effective contribution to social progress.

Taylor, who reformed the Sarah Lawrence curriculum radically between 1945 and 1959, is now director of the proposed Friends World College on Long Island and a special assistant to Adlai E. Stevenson, American Ambassador to the U.N.

A union of study and field work like that common in many college-level anthropology courses is a first step toward a progressive curriculum, he said. Any study in the social sciences or humanities, he suggested, can include constructive activity on the part of the student.

Students' Role

In addition, Taylor said the student should have a definite role in forming academic policy and in designing courses, which should change from year to year. This would force colleges to "recognize the student's level of sophistication."

The current policy in many colleges to insist upon a strictly ordered series of courses leading to a degree should be abandoned in favor of a system which would perimt far more freedom of choice, according to Taylor. Today's student heads for his A.B. degree, he said, "merely because everyone else is doing the same thing."

"Liberal arts colleges have been reduced to prep schools for graduate schools," Taylor charged, and he attacked the desire of Americans to send their children only to prestige colleges.

NSA staff members discussed the role of national student organizations in political change in Africa, Latin America, the Far East, and the Middle East in seminars at the conference. Taylor praised the active role of students in most countries, but the difficulty in many places, he said, is that student groups become the tool of a particular political party or interest group.

When the "individual student is acting within his own conviction," he will be making a contribution to his own society and to the world, Taylor said. NSA, he suggested, should develop student governments and political parties which can "express concern and take action on social issues."