Light at the End of a Tunnel

The General Education program prepared by the CEP is, on balance, the best brought forward during a year of Faculty debate. At worst it means roughly a retention of the present program; at best it offers the prospect of a number of new and well-constructed Gen Ed courses.

The new program would abolish compulsory lower-level Gen Ed. A student who had fulfilled certain prerequisites could complete his requirement by taking an upper-level Gen Ed course.

This is an excellent idea. It should lead to the establishment of a number of superior courses at the upper level, since professors would be drawn there by the prospect of an unusually well-prepared student body.

In addition, the new plan would eliminate what members of the Doty Committee considered a basic structural flaw in the present Gen Ed program: the diverse backgrounds of the students taking lower-level Gen Ed courses. As outstanding schools offer their students more and more college-level preparation, the gap between their graduates and those of less advanced schools grows. Sophomores, too, may come into lower-level Gen Ed courses with usually good preparation in their freshman courses. To confine well-prepared students to lower-level Gen Ed courses will come to seen increasingly foolish, but to boost the standards of these courses would be to deny the less-well-prepared the chance to come to Harvard. (We hope that the committee on General Education will eventually recognize this by making AP credit sufficient preparation for an upper-level Gen Ed course.)

Against this, it may be argued that a lower-level General Education course does not impart a body of knowledge, and does not require certain preparation, but allows students to study classical history, literature, and science, to study works that can be returned to with profit after any number of readings. If this were in fact the nature of the Gen Ed program, the proposed changes would be superflous--indeed, there never would have been any need to think of revising the program at all. Yet the General Education Committee has approved lower-level courses that by no means fit this description. Social Sciences 8 is an introduction to sociology and psychology, Social Sciences 111 a course in Far Eastern Civilization. If taking them constitutes a general education, why not permit students who have already assimilated the material to pursue it at a more advanced level, in courses that will retain the same broad interdepartmental nature?

In fact, the CEP's program offers the prospect of a battery of new upper-level courses, differing in content and perhaps in pre-requisites. To enhance this prospect, the Faculty should instruct the Committee on General Education to require calculus for upper-level Natural Science courses. Thus a professor in the sciences could expect a class with some background in science and advanced mathematics, and could plan a General Education course at the same time stimulating and rigorous.

The two-step requirement in Humanities and Social Sciences is equally sensible. It is true that the introductory departmental course will not in every case provide background for the upper-level General Education course. A student may be no better prepared for Social Sciences 139, "The Life Cycle," after passing Economics 1. But the prerequisite does insure that students will get a relatively broad view of an area, which an upper-level course alone might not provide. A student who has taken Economics 1 and Social Sciences 139 (plays presumably another half course in Social Sciences) has had a good general education in the Social Sciences.

The new program also has the desirable effect of allowing a student to postpone some of his General Education until his upperclass years. If the effect of General Education courses is to make students come to terms with the literature that men have read or the problems that have puzzled them for ceaturies, perhaps the encounter should be put off until a student's departmental education is in part behind him. The CEP plan arrives at the happy compromise of letting the student decide whether to tangle with Freud and Plato as a freshman or as a senior.

Even the sponsors of the CEP plan admit one defect, a defect that seems worse to us than it does apparently to them. Their plan assumes, as they admit, the existence of a body of courses which are not in the catalogue at present. Yet they say that the plan can be put into operation "without sweeping immediate changes or expansion of offerings." What they overlook is the present nature of upper-level General Education courses: a hodge-podge of brilliant courses, that provide general education by any definition, and very narrow all-but-departmental courses. Someone is going to have to go over the roster of these courses carefully and decide whether the "History of the Book," "Narrative in Oral Literature," or "The Planets: Their Environments and Inhabitants" should be permitted to remain on a list of courses that can satisfy the General Education requirement. If the focus of the General Education program is to be shifted towards the upper level and towards the junior and senior years, it would be foolish to rush into the new program with a selection of courses which were not designed for the purpose they will now be asked to fulfill.

There also seems to be no reason to bring the Faculty debate to a conclusion in order to begin the operation of the new program next year. The CEP plan is quite different from anything that has faced the Faculty before, yet it has been suggested that they spend just two hours discussing it before voting. There are a number of possible alternatives the Faculty will want to consider before voting.