Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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Williztm Ernest Hocking, the Alford Professor of Natural Re- ligion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Emeritus, still delivers occasional lectures, was a member of the recent Commission on Freedom of the Press. mtirm in ll Free Soviely, the elaborate report of a special Uni- versity Committee appointed during the war, presented a pro- gram for general education at Harvard, which was approved in principle by the Faculty in October, 1945. The term, general education, said the report, does not mean some airy educa- L. F, SOLANO TAYLOR STARCK Asww. l'l'nf. uf lioln:tn1-i- i7H.llL'1ll1Il.ft'H l'l'Hf4'HSUl' of fil'l'HHlII WILLIAM THOMSON ROBERT ULICH .Iiewi-Ll, l'mfw':4oi' of .-Xrzthirr Prof:-sruir of l'i1lut::tl.iou Serge Elisseeff along with Edwin Reischauer and Historian john Fairbanks have made Harvard's Far Eastern department one of the nation's best. tion in knowledge in general Cif there be such knowledgejf' nor does it mean education for all in the sense of universal education. It is used to indicate that part of a student's whole education which looks first of all to life as a responsible human being and citizen. The committee in charge of the new program added: Among the elements which go to make up general education are the cultivation ofa sense of values, the development of clear thinking, and an understanding of the physical and social world in which we live. - The General Education Program In the fall of 1946 the program began with eight experimental courses, each limited in size and restricted to Freshmen and Sophomotes. The total enrollment was 479. In 1947-48 more courses were added, including some speci- fically designed for upper classmen. Limitations on enrollment were taken off and the number of students increased to 1720. The courses were given in three fields: Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and the Humanities. In each the emphasis was on the subject not as a field for specialization but as a kind of knowledge with a way of thinking that must be understood for successful living in the modern world. The Student Council issued a report based on the opinions of the students who took part in the first year's program. This showed an impressively favorable response, especially to the courses in the humanities. In one of these Homer, the Old Testament, Plato, Dante, Montaigne, and Shakespeare were read and discussed as sources of out common ideas and as great examples of ways of thinking and 1461

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EDWIN REISCHAUER Associate Prnfc-ssor of Fur Hustt-ril liuugumrus GUILLER MO RIVERA 1 Assoeiiilre l'rofussor of Spanish GEORGE SARTON PAUL JOSEPH SACHS , , . Prof. of thc llistory of ben-line Professor of Finn Arts, Ifhncritus constant sources of stimulation. Even when they make him painfully conscious of his shortcomings and the looseness or superficiality of his thinking, they encourage him tO melld his ways by reinforcing his confidence in the value of his task. Professor Werner Jaeger is a distinguished classicist, the world's authority on Aristotle. 'I4Sl FRANCIS ROGERS Assn:-inte Professor of Ronmmr' lruligilmu-s rind lritvrntiiri- JAKOB ROSENBERG BENJAMIN ROWLAND Professor of Fine Arts Assoeiuie Professor of Fine Arts i HENRY SHEFFER GEORGE WILEY SHERBURN Professor of Philosophy 1'rofi-ssor of English JEAN-JOSEPH SEZNEC Sniitrh Professor nf the Frvneh iuitl Spanish Lnngimizvs The Need for Humane Teaching Indeed, one of the partial compensations for the tragedy of the war seems sure to be an improvement in the understanding and teaching of the humanities. Men with new problems, new backgrounds of experience, and new aspira- tions, will not long be put off with old methods and stale platitudes. If every age must rewrite history and think out its own critical interpretations, this is doubly true in a time in which so much of life and love and loyalty, sacrifice, suffering, and death has been crowded into a few years, and in a time in which the problems of survival for even a half-way decent human society are so bitterly acute as now. Mere shifts in mechanical devices of pedagogy are not enough. Whether television, the radio, the phonograph record, the movie, the conference, or the lecture, are used is not the question. What matters now for the teacher of the humanities, and for the student, is whether the teaching is itself humane, solidly grounded on the principle that just as the material is alive because it is important for living, so its presentation in the classroom must be alive because it is the product of minds in a free, sympathetic, and lively relation. The postwar student has already proved his need for such teaching and his right to it, the obligation of every Harvard teacher of the humanities is to prove his awareness of the need and the right andto devote his full energy to meeting the responsibility they put upon him. One way of meeting the challenge has been the estab- lishment of the courses in General Education. Gemfrrzl Edu-

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feeling current among us. Their essential thought was examined as the core of the Western tradition . . . through which we still comprehend man himself, as a social being, and as a partner in belief. In another course the epic and the novel were studied with such texts as the Iliad, the Otlyrrey, the Divine Comedy, Pumclife Loft, and a group of novels ranging from Don Quixote to M aby Dirk and War and Peace. Finally two half-courses dealt with Individual and Social Values in Literature,', first in history and drama and then in fiction and philosophy. The texts were chosen to reflect a variety of attitudes toward the continuing interplay between society and the individual and were studied with reference to the nature of the forms, and the logic and rhetoric underlying them, with the emphasis on concepts of personality, motiva- tion, and ethical responsibility, and the manner of their em- bodiment in literary forms. Success but No Panacea All these courses were repeated in 1947-48 and to them were added three other half-courses, one on Classics of the Christian Tradition an introduction to the Christian spirit as it has been expressed in some of its greatest expositors, one on Great Artists, designed to introduce students to the world of creative achievement in the visual arts by means Of a direct approach dispensing with theoretical systems and involving historical considerations only to help to pro- mote response and understanding, and a third on Types of The authors of the famed General Education Report. Clockwise: Dean Buck, Professors Ulich, Dunlop, Wright, jones, Demos, Hoadley, Gaus, Schlesinger, Wilson, and Finley. Members of KARL VIETOR , , l iimi-kv Prnfi-ssor nf Gi-rnmn Ili 'K .-Xrt, :mil Culture EDWARD ULLMAN Assirdlviilili l'rnfm-ssnr of lit-ginlull ANDREWS WANNING l'ri'L2iEliilif?l'hllii:iRmliy .min irii t 1-r.if.vSW .if i+:i.,aiaHi. Art: the Representation of Nature in European and Asiatic Art, a treatment of selected masterpieces with consideration in its broadest sense of the whole question of man's reaction to the world he lives in and the means by which . . . artists the Committee not shown in the picture include Byron S. Hollins- head, President Wilbur K. jordan of Radcliffe, I. A. Richards, Phillip J. Rulon, and George Wald. l47l v L unset