Reflections on a Harvard Education

As we gather for the annual ritual of conferring degrees, it seems appropriate to reflect on what we are really conferring. The answer is simple—Harvard diplomas—but explaining what it represents is not so simple at all.

A Harvard education brings with it high expectations. A Harvard degree raises the stature of any resume. Harvard graduates travel well-paved roads to success. But what is it that students, faculty, and staff at this institution are doing to make it this way? What defines a Harvard education?

During my visits to other institutions, I have had frequent opportunities to observe large lecture classes. Usually I stand in the very back, from where I can see the activities of both the students and the instructor. What follows is a typical scene from one of these occasions.

In a science class, a very animated young professor delivers a dazzling lecture on electromagnetism. He paces around the front, gesticulating enthusiastically while talking to the audience and writing large, clear equations on the blackboard. The instructor is a charismatic presenter, articulate and energetic, and his lecture is clear and lucid.

The students, on the other hand, seem rather disengaged. Half of them appear to be dozing off, judging from the precarious angle of their heads. Of the remaining half, a number are surfing the Web on their laptops. The rest are trying to capture the professor’s knowledge by furiously scribbling in their notebooks. The large lecture hall is two-thirds empty.

Then the professor pauses. “Any questions?” A stony silence ensues. The scribblers stop scribbling. The surfers interrupt their surfing. The professor looks around, waits a few seconds, but as no questions are forthcoming, he exclaims “Good!” and resumes lecturing.

With few exceptions the picture is the same the world over. As a matter of fact, looking back at my own education, this is how I was taught.

The classroom activity I just described is a one-way transfer of information—from the instructor to the students. If education were a mere transfer of information (and a Harvard education the transfer of this information by very accomplished faculty), then we could easily “bottle” a Harvard education and spread it worldwide. Just turn our lectures into flawlessly executed podcasts and let the masses download them. Nothing will be lost in the experience. In fact, everyone will have a front-row seat and an advantage that no one has in a real lecture: the ability to pause and rewind. Of course, you can’t ask questions, but I didn’t observe many questions being asked (in the lectures I attended, anyway.)

If you are skeptical, I don’t blame you. I don’t think we can capture a Harvard education this way.

The reason is that education is so much more than the mere transfer of information. The information has to be assimilated. Students have to connect the information to what they already know, develop mental models, learn how to apply the new knowledge, and how to adapt this knowledge to new and unfamiliar situations.

Where, then, does this assimilation happen?

When I first started teaching here at Harvard, I certainly did not ask myself that question. I simply taught the way I had been taught. For my lectures, I developed notes that were different from the assigned reading. After all, I did not want to be accused of lecturing from the textbook.

When my students asked for copies of my lecture notes, I gladly obliged. The next year, I assigned the same textbook and handed out the complete set of notes on the first day of class. The dismaying result: a handful of students complained that I was lecturing straight from my lecture notes! I was outraged, but the students were foreshadowing a conclusion I would only reach many years later: education is not the verbal presentation of information that is readily available in other forms.

For many years I happily ignored these complaints—after all, my end-of-semester evaluations were great and my students did well on what I considered difficult exams. By all measures I was doing a good job.

So I lectured and my students took notes. Never mind if someone described the lecture method as a process whereby the notes of the instructor get transferred to the notebooks of the students without passing through the brains of either!

But one year I asked my students some very basic conceptual questions and discovered that they were unable to answer them. By comparing my students’ performance on various types of problems, I came to the agonizing conclusion that many students were simply making it through the course by rote memorization. Beyond the familiar context, they were unable to apply even the most basic principles. Suddenly the illusion of being a good teacher was shattered.

The problem is that lecturing does not provide much, if any, opportunity for students to assimilate the information presented. And so students concentrate on being able to answer the type of questions they will be examined on. Yet education is more about asking questions than giving answers. Upon receiving the Nobel prize, Isidor Rabi attributed his becoming an inquiring scientist to his mother, who would always ask him after school: “Izzy, did you ask a good question today?”

But just as the best education should be centered on asking questions, so should the best teaching. I could have continued to ignore the problems that the lecture format poses, but as a scientist I’ve learned not to ignore the data: something had to change.

So I still give my students a copy of my lecture notes, but now I require them to read the notes before coming to class. In class I don’t lecture, but engage students in an interplay of questioning and discussion to help them assimilate the material. Yes, some students surf the Web and a few doze off. But attendance and engagement are exceptionally high and my students can now solve problems they have never seen before. Most importantly, students ask many questions.

I am no longer accused of lecturing from my lecture notes. The main and often vocal complaint now is that I don’t teach my students anything—they have to learn it all on their own!

Oddly, that is probably the key to a Harvard education. Somehow we collectively manage to provide just the right learning environment for our students to develop inquiring minds. And so the degrees that are conferred today do not so much reflect the answers that our students have given, but the questions they have asked.

Any questions?

Eric Mazur is McKay Professor of Applied Physics.