The Education of Henry Adams, 1988

TWO months before entering Harvard, I received a thick packet which contained lengthy pamphlets detailing Harvard's history, the Core curriculum, the Quantitative Reasoning Requirement, the Expository Writing program, the House system, the schedule for freshman week, and countless other tidbits too rich to be digested immediately. Buried amid this minutiae, however, was a summer reading list of just two works, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Education of Henry Adams.

It stood in sharp relief from the rest of the packet. Where the bulk of the mailing had an air of mindless veneration for this institution (quoting Cotton Mather liberally), Adams' book offered a tale of Harvard's inadequacy--the "chief wonder of education" here being that Harvard did not completely "ruin everybody concerned with it."

Now, approximately 700 lectures and 70,000 pages later, my mind returns to Henry Adams. Adams was convinced that his education at Harvard--too rooted in present concerns--did not begin to prepare him for his later life. "The attempt of the American of 1800 to educate the American of 1900," he wrote, "had not often been surpassed for folly...The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate the American of 2000," he was equally convinced, "must be even blinder."

JUST how blindly have we marched toward today's exercises in Tercentenary Theater these past four years? To what extent has this institution heeded the lessons of its summer reading and endowed us with an education that will weather the enormous changes of the next 50 years?

If freshman week was any indication, Harvard has failed miserably. The purpose of assigning reading to all incoming freshmen was to give our diverse class something in common--a subject about which every entering student, regardless of background, could talk during the first weeks of the year. My first day here, I found myself standing in the Yard with 10 equally tense freshmen. Henry Adams quickly became a topic of conversation. "Did anyone here do the summer reading?" asked one. "No, no way" each said in turn with perverse pride.

"Good meeting you all," I said, my face flush, as I quickly left. I had read Adams and so had nothing to say. My sole experience with a "great books" program offered an ironic glimpse of what it might have yielded in the regular curriculum. Skipped or unreflective reading would mean a passed-over education with a vengeance.

We are fortunately, the products of an education more idealistic and high-minded. It stresses method and approach rather than command of specific subjects and particular books; it is at once more humble and more demanding. Such a philosophy is the keystone of Harvard's curriculum, not only of the Core curriculum, but of the tutorial program as well.

It is premised on the idea that assuming the existence of a single path to the company of educated men and women is pure presumption--that the generation of 1900 is as blind as we are. Specific information about many specific subjects may be useful to us today, but several decades hence will be hopelessly outdated. The question is one of durability: what expiration date should be stamped on our sheepskins?

Allowing for future change gives such an education its inherent humility. It self-consciously confesses its own powerlessness in the face of a civilization in perpetual motion and does not pretend to teach us what we "need" to know.

And here lay the basis of our education's demanding nature as well. In teaching us approaches, our courses and tutorials act with the faith that, once inspired, we will continue to read and think on our own. Indeed, they assume that we are now properly equipped to begin the endless process of educating ourselves.

What is deficient at Harvard is not the ideal but the implementation. Core courses are too large, while teaching often falls to graduate students largely ignorant of the Core's larger goals. As facts take the place of method, the ghost of Henry Adams snickers.

The Core thus needs to be rethought and further steeped in its own ideals. The faculty desperately needs to be enlarged so that more, smaller courses can be offered and undergraduates can be liberated from the menace of inept graduate students who have the potential to ruin otherwise fine courses fine courses and undermine even the most ideal curriculum.

In Adams day, a Harvard education "resulted in an autobiographican blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped." Ours has, I am convinced, produced more than a watermark, but it has also eschewed filling up the mind's pages with indelible ink. While shrill voices today prophesy doom for a class educated as ours, it seems to me that some of us might just be able to meet Henry Adams face to face without shuddering.