RELOCATING READING PERIOD

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Mr. Imam's proposal for relocating reading period shrewdly diagnoses the worst tendencies of Harvard's present lecture system. He explains why most sections are so deadly and why lectures are often a drowsy experience. But he fails, I think, to treat his own scheme with the same critical rigor he lets fall on the operating one.

It seems extraordinarily optimistic to contend that students can do all the reading for three or four courses (on any level of superficiality) within three weeks. Most of us just don't read that quickly. Imam, himself, argues that keeping up with reading during the term takes so much of a student's time that he has none left for extracurricular life. Probably neither of these major contentions can be true; statistically they cannot both be.

Mr. Imam also wants to play student sloth both ways. Wouldn't the same tendency that keeps students from doing any reading during the term, keep them from going to lectures with the final exam already out of the way? And certainly those long papers would be postponed until the last moment, making late springtime every bit the academic grind it is now.

The crucial argument Mr. Imam makes for his scheme is that it would make study and learning "circular" rather than "linear." For many non-science courses (Fine Arts, Ec. 1, Soc. Sci. 2) learning ought to be linear. As for the rest, it is not clear that a switch in the sequence of lectures and reading solves the problem. Students now miss significant points of lectures or forget them by the time they get to the reading. Under the new system they would miss the importance of much of the reading (save for bits they scurried back to reread after a lecture) and would forget the reading they had done in September by the time the professor talked about it in January.

Obviously this parallel is a bit specious since reading and lectures have different functions. But I do think lectures can legitimately be introductory, and that Mr. Imam's proposal lifts them to an independent eminence they rarely have. The final act in most courses finds the student putting the primary materials together in his own way, and it may be enough for lectures to suggest how this might be done. Lawrence J. Richardson '69