THE PRESS

Six weeks of the college year to be free of all classes or any set exercises whatever! And this in addition to the accustomed vacations at Christmas and Easter, though the latter appear somewhat shortened. Was ever a more radical change ordained by Harvard in the undergraduates' calendar since the college was founded? Very evidently the decision rests, however, upon the authorities.

Oxford and Cambridge suggest themselves as source of this radical change, almost without precedent as it is in any college of the United States today. Indeed, the official announcement points out that in the past Harvard's period of formal teaching and examination has always been from two to three months longer than in the British or Continental-universities. And this fact is cited in partial justification of the reduction of formal exercises now decreed by Harvard. The use of that particular argument is significant. Time was, not many years ago, when American educators for the most part spoke of the long vacations at Oxford and Cambridge, with only slightly hidden disdain. These institutions, it was implied, were only easy going country clubs on opening anyway, compared to the stern standards of American and Tenionic teaching, and the long vacations were merely characteristic of the English students propensity for idling. But in more recent years, chiefly since the war, a new view has been evident. An uneasy feeling has grown up in the United States, based upon actual observation, that after all these idling British university men were somehow better educated, more developed in their intellectual capacities, stronger on their own feet in the use of what they knew, than were our American students constantly confined to the hothouse of the classroom.

The new Harvard calendar, cutting away six weeks of formal lectures and recitations, surely gives liberal allowance to student opinion on this score. But it goes further. It takes very effectively into account the immense amount of work which has been done in recent years in the investigation of all those conditions which may be shown, by scientific test and inquiry, to be the most favorable conditions under which human beings can work and study and enlarge their capacities. The novel departure at Harvard pays real deference, in short, to the modern science of pedagogics. The declaration that "the student must have time for consecutive reading and other large tasks, free from a schedule that breaks up his work into small, unrelated units" might well have been cribbed directly from any good modern handbook on the psychology and technique of education. It is a doctrine which has had great influence during the last decade in the high schools, the grade schools and even the better kindergartens. But in American colleges, where the psychologists of education live and draw their pay who have discovered these new dogmas and made them influential, the science of pedagogics has for the most part gone unapplied. The general run of university teachers usually know nothing of it.

Harvard has determined to apply an important part of it now, and it is a very great and interesting venture indeed. Unquestionably for a time it will be found that some, students who know not how to use their new liberty will abuse the "free periods," and will be harmed by them. But the men who are worthy this new trust--and their number will increase as time goes on--will turn it to most significant and availing account. Boston Transcript, March 4