Frogs

Frogs perceive the world only as a schematic digaram of what is relevant to them. They see nothing that does not move toward them. In that they always move forward; that is all they ordinarily need. They occasionally starve to death in a cage supplied with dead flies.

The usual object of our affections, man is also conditioned to perceive that which he finds useful for survival. Man lives in the world of information he originally needed for hunting and gathering. Like his organs of perception, this world has not changed much since Harvard first brought wisdom to the New World.

The use of that world of information, however, is a reflection of his culture. To wit, a farmer sees a different meadow than a city the large human questions at stake than can a different notion of "culture" than a bacteriologist or intellectual historian.

However, unlike frogs-as-far-as-we-know, man, and particularly the young of the species, notices a good deal more than is perhaps immediately or ultimately significant for his continued existence. He often needs to respond in some way to these notices.

Unless you believe that the individual must be molded to meet the relevant and increasingly specialized needs of his society and not vice versa, this response to irrelevant perceptions is of value. Each individual must at some point have the opportunity for that response. I feel, and I suppose this must be a personal decision, that the further narrowing of the area in which each individual responds even slightly will unduly crimp his growth.

A responsibility to the rest of humanity and their experience far outweighs profound specialization, an ultimately vain search. Indeed, the society's demands complicate themselves faster as specialized skills are developed to deal with the complications. Specialization is a tool that deals only with fragments. This world is not yet so shattered.

Historically, man's need to respond to seemingly irrelevant material was a tremendous adaptive advantage because it led to discoveries of quantitatively better ways to live. This advantage still exists and functions better in individuals than in institutions which may churn our these discoveries faster. The greatest value of such discoveries is in the making of them. As improvements, they hardly affect the quality of life. Moreover an institution making a collective discovery does not respond with joy of the charming human sort. The occasional incidents of one man's joy of discovery are perhaps more important to the quality of life and the advancement of learning than the discovery itself.

Each individual must make his own irrelevant discoveries in order to live in a world built on the irrelevant discoveries of his fellows. There is a need for the specialized abilities required to use some of these discoveries, but a response to a really round world helps keep it round.

The undergraduate education ought to be a time of some of the most important world-discoveries. Man's perception, unlike that of the frog-by-itself, is strongly, though perhaps not carefully, shaped by education. The university is entrusted with the vital task of shaping the foundations of that sensibility, a responsibility that must be its prime function.

Harvard lies in a unique position to effect constructive change in the way an individual is shaped for his last half-century. The University's stature in the educative community ensures that what is done in Cambridge will be felt throughout the country. Indeed, Harvard is a center for the education of educators, who will carry marks of thought here deep into the foundations of the next generation's education.

Such great resource and power carry with them an equally great obligation. That obligation goes far deeper than a simple, single-minded devotion to the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is better advanced by transmission than by collection. Tis a highway and no walled-in city alley.

II

At present the undergraduate education is an attempt to balance a disciplined competence with the cultivation of a broader understanding. A worthy objective. However, the emphasis in such general exposures to other worlds has been on the study of records of perception instead of any investigations of the worlds themselves. Consequently the student may never catch sight of the problems of the realm in question as he wanders more and less lost in the maze of great names, books and categories.

A student's understanding is not greatly deepened because he can distinguish the style of Delacroix from that of Gericault, though his eyesight may improve. Learning to write expository criticism is not as important as learning to look. Criticism can only distinguish between styles, disciplines and forms, and consequently deals only with the tools of perception. Tools are a means, not an end.

A better understanding of fine arts and the visual world may result from first-hand experience with what the artists saw and the materials of line and color they used to deal with that "what." A painting of a nude makes more sense to one who has seen a nude.

Guidance along these lines is more likely to aid in the appreciation of the visual world than are histories of artists predicated on bald verbal exposition. How can you preserve a visual tradition for the blind? The critical perception must be balanced by the imaginative perception.

The increasing size of classes seems to demand, as an administrative convenience, that a student be judged and classified. As a consequence, the students are assigned work in prescribed forms to facilitate mass judgments. How can we expect to open new areas of thought if even visual ideas are treated the same as verbal ideas, in verbal exposition?

With words too, one must go outside the frame of exposition in order to properly understand their limits and meanings. There are other forms of word-use as valuable as exposition that deal with different, not worthless, problems. Exposition is spoiled when it must strain to deal with every kind of problem.

Here we study poetry, if at all, for insight into more poetry, not for a poet's insight into the world. Poetry is more than an elaborate form of chess. No other vehicle can carry you so headily into some warm regions of thought. Those regions are worth visiting, filled as they are with a wealth that is inexhaustible, because rediscovered and thus enhanced by each new problem.

All too often, students are encouraged to read poetry as a puzzling form of prose to be elucidated by sweet exposition. Cataloguing the various senses of a character in Shakespeare can kill in glibness the possibility of understanding of his vision. Teach the Bible, but not because it is seventeenth-century English literature.

Teaching "beauty" as a thing to be weighed and catalogued destroys the sense of the word. Over-used, the word has fallen far from its status as "truth." This progressive loss of meaning was at least abetted by the cold, analytic approach to the term in the University.

The contemplation of the truths in poetry is a vital step in a student's growth. The General Education Program in the Humanities was invented for that sort of growth. How else do it? What other function can there be for requiring the study of humanities?

In the social sciences, we are taught to distinguish and use the various constructs men have super-imposed on macroscopic human relations. We are asked to imitate and admire successful paradigm-makers. Fun? Yes, but no finite construct has or can adequately describe let alone explain any large sum of human activity.

The bad effects of such contractual training are evident in the over-simplified and over-ambitions rhetorics that are seriously imposed in contemporary politics.

The obligation of the social sciences is to make a student more aware of questions of responsibility in society, and not in the mechanics of the artificial disciplines created to study it. This is not done by teaching old dogmas. Social analysis is often intended and all too frequently read as dogma: that is its principal flaw.

A study of social problems on a more intimate level may be more useful. The arena of human motivation and interplay of an average poker game is studded with more insights into the large human questions at stake than can be drawn from Hegel.

Of course the University need not organize poker games, although it now gives credit for group therapy and statistics. Too much time is spent, though, on abstract theory which may stand in the way of understanding the true social science, if it really be a science, that of understanding people.

The rigorous demands for early specialization in the natural sciences render inaccessible much of the insight that science offers.

Advances in the scientific specialties require early, intense concentration on getting to know the tools of research. These advances are important but perhaps overrated. Too often the advancement of science is mistaken for the idol to whom obeisance is due instead of the amelioration of the lot of man. In either case, the idol often calls for human sacrifice.

The relation of a scientist's work to any human needs beyond the desire to be accepted by the scientific community is perhaps the least explored area in the field. It is a very real problem. A concerted effort to bring the scientific understanding home to a society so largely shaped by the products of that understanding is too valuable to be shunted aside as secondary to research.

Each individual should at least learn to see through some of the fraud that is passed off as science. Almost all the claims of the drug industry need to be greeted with more discriminating eyes. The scandal over cyclamates and the general confusion over poisons in foodstuffs seem to illustrate a misunderstanding of what science and technology are in the wold. The power that science has unleashed has engendered a cross-eyed belief and consequent perversion of much scientific knowledge.

The hysteria over the word "ecology" has submerged most real issues. Ecology is an idea of balance and not a political issue. Politics never seem to transcend the scale of banner-waving. "Ecology" does not comfortably fit a banner. Banners that are waved too hard tend to flutter at last in tatters.

III

Must Harvard be a professional prep school? Students are seen as unpleasant vacuums to be stuffed as soon as possible. The individual sensibility capable of learning something in a manner that may even prove stimulating to a teacher is treated as an introducer in Academia. Consequently that student hides and sometimes dies.

"What happened to all the life they had when they were freshmen?" It is not surprising that life drains from a student who must learn worn-out paradigms and conjure with them. Too often, the overloaded departments hide behind the arbitrary rules of convenience and forget what is the function of the department.

The professors reward those who precociously emulate them in the use of the honed-down tools of some over-defined discipline. This is a perversion of the liberal education, conceived to be somehow different from a professional apprenticeship.

The tools and disciplines are seen as the absolutes, and learning is conceived as service to these rather paltry absolutes. This is an empty sort of anarchy, substituting erudition for sweetness and regulation of light. Forms are empty if prefabricated and compared.

Problems define the disciplines necessary to solve them, but at Harvard one is expected to deal with the problems of the discipline. In many cases, students benefit greatly by exposure to an academic discipline. But surely the University can permit other forms of inquiry.

IV

Harvard no longer has a sound ideological foundation for the education it offers. Its old ideal, the liberal education, seems lost in administrative quibbles. Widener, the laboratories and museums are valuable tools, but even more valuable is the question of their use. Surely wisdom has more function than filling libraries.

The world-view of science is concealed from the average student because of the demand for trained professionals and researchers. In the departments themselves, research is rewarded at the expense of teaching.

The humanities bog down in criticism, history, and scholarly research which are not appropriate tools for education, however useful they are in scholarship. The responsibility for education falls not only upon scholars who have other obligations and are not suitably trained.

The social sciences get lost in the analytic paradigms and sterile historicisms that abstract themselves above the level of ordinary responsibility in social issues. There are more important questions than techniques of manipulation, nor are quotations from Marx a major form of understanding.

Concentrations, instead of serving as tools to focus a student are treated as binding molds that a student must fit in growing. In this case the simplest reform is best. Just leave more loopholes in the requirements for concentration. The new independent studies program, although it asks the right questions, is too complicated and asks them at the wrong time.

The responsibility for learning devolves on the student anyway. No amount of requirements, however foolish, can force learning. It is also silly that freshmen have more freedom than seniors. Senior year is the right time for free study and should perhaps be dedicated to the question of "What have I learned?" or given how things run now, "What should I have learned?" Freshmen should study mathematics, Greek, music and drawing.

In reexamining its goals, the University must recognize its prime responsibility in education. The best means of doing this is to develop a faculty whose prime interest is teaching. This involves some personal renewal on the part of everyone on the faculty. Responsibility only sits on the shoulders of individuals. Committees slouch.

Frogs can live only in the world they expect. What am I to expect? Our worlds seems to have a lot of dead flies. Shall we starve?