Educating Harvard

I'm nearing the end of my sophomore year now and like some others, I wonder if Harvard thinks we're really learning much.

Amazingly, the student body is as apathetic as the faculty about fixing this situation. Too often it seems, we're busy worrying about, if not being consumed by, important details of life such as extracurriculars, exams, and interviews. I fear that we are not paying enough attention collectively to the actual education we get (or make for ourselves) while we are at Harvard.

Perhaps there are strong competing reason to come here aside from a good liberal-arts education: if you are one of the people who came here with the calculated goal of getting a good job after college and meeting impressive people while you're here, stop reading. If not, and you too are distressed by what passes for a Harvard education, then please read on.

Harvard is not educating us poorly. Rather, it could do better with what it's got. Harvard's goal, I suggest, ought to be the complete restoration of a Socratic dialectic in our education. An ethic of continuous self-improvement demands more than just CUE Guide evaluations.

I have two questions: first, why are the connections between lectures, readings, sections and assignments so often unclear? Second, what's the point of having so many classes in which the assignments don't really test mastery of the material, or in the Core's alleged case, approaches to knowledge? I've taken 17 classes here (OK, one of them was Expos), and am amazed that a significant number of them had no clearly-defined mission or statement of purpose.

Professors rarely explain the connections between lectures and reading assignments. Are lectures simply expositions of the reading, or do they represent a professor's particular spin on the texts? Are assignments designed to integrate what we've learned or simply to indulge our individual research interests? Are closed-book midterms and finals truly the best gauge of our knowledge? Many Core and departmental course requirements provide little evidence that anyone in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences pays attention to what people in the School of Education have been telling us for years.

In humanities and social sciences, for example, many large lecture classes still use midterms and finals as their basic requirements. Some toss in an undefined term-paper at the end. The Core office mandates its professors give, at minimum, a midterm and a final. This inertia continues despite what education scholars have long recommended: The most effective teaching and learning occurs through constant writing and revision.

Most departments know this in part and offer writing-intensive tutorials in sophomore year. Yet the College makes little effort to spread the good word to many large classes. For example, one of the largest courses at Harvard, Literature and Arts C-37 (The Bible and Its Interpreters), doesn't require any written work. Is it any wonder then that most people blow off the reading until the midterm or reading period? Clearly, students of all stripes are attracted to guts. But the price we pay is a lost opportunity to gain and retain something valuable--knowledge.

While exams do provide the opportunity (some might say coercion) to make us review our course material, how much do we actually retain once we've handed in our blue books? True, not all courses rely solely on midterms and finals. My point is that Harvard should make more use of our tutorial system, which focuses on close reading of texts, discussion and continuous evaluation.

One significant way of achieving this is through revisions. How many of your classes encourage you to actually revise a paper when you get it back? I'm taking three gov classes this semester with nine papers required; none of my classes allow for or encourage revisions. By contrast, in last semester's gov tutorial I wrote five papers and had five opportunities for revision. It's no surprise that tutorial was my most rewarding class yet.

Why not encourage revisions? The major objection I've heard is that revisions create more work for students as well as for teaching fellows. I wonder if this objection is really compelling. Contrary to popular belief, a recent study showed that most college students are under-worked. College students spend only thirty hours a week on academic affairs. Most students in the humanities and social sciences only average between twelve and fifteen hours in class per week; some can arrange as few as eight hours.

Students are ostensibly in college for educational purposes. Would it really be the end of the world if we had an option to revise our papers? How many of us wouldn't appreciate the opportunity to raise the quality of our grades, if not our actual essays? The one good thing about Expos was its emphasis on revision as part of the learning process.

As for the teaching fellows, perhaps they would have more time to read papers if we did away with most traditional lectures. I don't quite understand why we persist with this archaic format where professors just read the same lecture notes they've read for years, changing them a little every now and then. Why is it so unthinkable to do away with the speech and fluff that goes into a fifty minute lecture?

I've sat through too many lectures where a lame professor belabors the same point for twenty minutes and I end up with less than a half page of notes at the end of class, and drool on the side of my mouth from dozing off. (The dozing off is a consequence, not a cause, of my paucity of notes.) On the other hand, some professors' lectures are so dense that it's virtually impossible to make sense of what they're saying. In both cases, a written copy of the lecture material might make the presentations more rigorous, comprehensive and comprehensible.

I imagine that in classes that require no physical demonstration and offer no interaction, both students and professors would be better off dropping the lecture format. No doubt, at least half of my classes easily could adapt to a strictly tutorial system. For students who might miss the "live" thrill of being there in Harvard Hall or at Sanders, perhaps we could hire a few professional lecturers to perform their "art" on different topics all day. It would at least make for a better division of labor. Under this system, professors might have extra time to teach sections--and actually see their students up close.

Harvard should either make its lectures more interactive or ditch them completely in favor of more sections and time spent on reading and writing. Similarly, the Faculty should apply more thought and scrutiny to course requirements. It seems unlikely that the College will encourage collaborative work in the social sciences or humanities any time soon. We should at least attempt to make wise use of our individual time and effort.

Remember that we (ostensibly, anyway) came here for a good liberal-arts education.