'29 Symposium Debates Liberal Education

Four professors individually combined, attacked, and reconciled liberal and general educations at the Class of 1929's first reunion symposium yesterday afternoon in Sanders Theater.

At the end of the debate, Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetiric an Oratory, concluded: "We must reconsider the objectives of a liberal education, but more important, we must reaffirm them, or we run the risk of defeating communism by a new communism."

Philip H. Rhinelander, Director of General Education, moderated the forum on "The Objectives of a Liberal Education," and the speakers, in addition to MacLeish, were McGeorge Bundy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Bart J. Bok, Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy.

There is a constantly shifting triangle of forces in education, Bundy said; with the students, the teachers, and the subject at the vertices. "Somewhere in the imaginative connection of the three is the guts of the matters."

Rhinelander has pointed out in his introductory remarks that the systems of elective courses, tutorial, general education, and advanced standing were steps in the liberal education plan.

He later added that a majority of the students polled by the late Ernest A. Hooton, professor of Anthropology, felt that the General Education program gave them a greater "sense of values," "development of clear thinking," and "understanding of the physical and social world in which we live."

Bok thereupon attacked General Education courses, especially in the Natural Science field, on three grounds. First, their prerequisites are too low, he said, making the calibre of the courses themselves low and encouraging preparatory schools to take advantage of low standards.

Secondly, because they are compulsory, they force a student away from the experience of interested investigating and mistakes. This is connected with the third fault, the broad content of the courses, which discourages, said Bok, any workable knowledge. He suggested that freshmen take basic courses in specific fields rather than try to get a smattering of many fields in a Natural Science course.

MacLeish then praised General Education as "an enlightened effort to save specialized society from its specialists," for "specialized society knowledge turned inside out is specialized ignorance."

But, he continued, General Education is an antidote. It is not a synonym for liberal education, which cannot be negative, but must be a positive affirmation.