A Modern Archimedes

Early this fall the "Princetonian" commented editorially on the educational experiment of a Syracuse professor, who has abolished note-taking during his lectures and substituted a printed resume of his course for distribution among the students taking it. At that time we reviewed the lecture situation at Princeton and sought to establish the desirability of such a reform as that initiated by Professor Vaughan. It was our contention that the ideal of the Princeton lecture-precept system was to develop the student's faculty of interpreting and associating the basic text-book data of a course, that this ideal was not being subserved under present conditions, when in many cases lectures are merely concentrated doses of factual information, and that in consequence a remedy should be worked out along the lines of Professor Vaughan's innovation.

The faults of the present lecture system constitute a vicious circle. Either a lecture is what it is ideally supposed to be--namely, and attempt to arouse, sustain, and direct the student's interest in the subject under consideration-- in which case the mechanical operation of taking notes distracts attention to the extent of counteracting that ideal; or else the lecture is a more runningfire of lifeless facts, and hence a use of time which might better be spent in the reading of some reliable text-book. Naturally, a lecture must embody the elemental facts of its subject, but these facts should be presented in correlation, not in compilation. Anyone who has listened as an outsider to such justly famous lectures as those in History 201-2 or Architecture 201-2, and has afterwards enrolled in the course and found himself under the necessity of taking down voluminous notes, will realize how appreciation if not comprehension is forestalled by the practice. As for those courses in which the lectures consist largely of dry factual material, the less said about them the better. Often the lecturer is merely acting under a sense of obligation, and suffers quite as much as his hearers.

In either case, the advantage of printed notes would be incalculable. The lecturer would be free to give full play to his enthusiasm for the subject, interpreting here, illustrating there, and inculcating the relation of his particular field with the philosophical scheme of things. The student would be free to absorb all this and grasp the far-reaching implications of the subject as well as the logical pattern of its factual basis, as provided by the notes. Lectures could become a means of enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction, rather than a mere frantic wearing-out of pencils.

This somewhat Utopian ideal could, of course, never be fully consummated in the nature of things. A minority of lecturers would continue to be talking text-books. A minority of students would take advantage of the new system to cut, just as they take advantage of the present system to avoid supplementary reading and depend solely on the disconnected facts they glean from lectures. In both cases, however, they would suffer the same penalty as at present --the former by lecturing to empty seats, the latter by premature ejection from the realms of higher education. The true understanding of a subject, as demanded by Princeton's educational ideal, can no more be obtained from a skeletal outline of its material than from an indiscriminate list of its facts. --Daily Princetonian