What Are We Really Learning Here?

Pablo Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” At Harvard, we spend our four years mastering methods too, but unlike Picasso, we’re not growing past them.

Harvard teaches us frameworks for everything: how to structure an argument, read a text, or solve a problem. Frameworks are how we learn to see, but when treated as an endpoint, they also narrow what we see. Now that faculty are being pushed to enforce grade caps, students have more reason than ever to stop trying once they master the formula. As it stands, we risk stifling the creativity and curiosity that allows us to expand our perspectives.

The real goal of a liberal arts education is outgrowing frameworks — it’s time for Harvard to recognize that.

By frameworks, I mean the templates we are handed for doing intellectual work: the thesis-evidence-analysis essay in Expos, supply and demand curves in Economics 10: “Principles of Economics,” fields of literary critique in an English seminar, or the set of techniques a problem set trains us to reach for. These are genuinely good tools, but the tool should not become the target. We stop aiming for an understanding of the subject, replacing it with a mechanical execution of the framework.

That pressure is about to grow. In May, faculty voted to cap A’s at 20 percent of a course’s enrollment, plus up to four additional A’s. The policy formally takes effect in 2027, but Harvard College Dean David J. Deming said administrators will encourage professors to start following it this fall. Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh even said that Harvard will forcefully change course grades from A’s to A-’s if professors do not follow the cap, before later backtracking. When the difference between grades comes down to arbitrary percentages and a professor’s prerogatives, why would anyone risk breaking the rules with an original idea?

This risk-averse retreat from creativity isn’t a new phenomenon. Take the Einstellung effect, a psychological concept where people fall back on the same formula for doing something even when more effective solutions exist. When we execute the same method over and over again, we become blinded by its familiarity, and we limit the creativity and efficiency of your problem solving.

Writer Susan Sontag famously critiqued these learned frameworks in “Against Interpretation.” She argued that when we focus too much on art’s “content” or “meaning” and seek to cleanly categorize it, we no longer experience its impact. If every text, assignment, or work of art becomes one more place to apply a theory, the simplest question — what does this piece actually do to me? — is lost.

Of course, Harvard has an incentive to structure our education through frameworks: They’re easy to grade. My teaching fellow can check whether my thesis is arguable, or if I properly applied vocabulary from a concept we studied in class. Yet an original idea is much harder to measure, or even produce in the first place. And at a place like Harvard, where there is extreme pressure to perform well academically, anything hard to measure becomes a risk. When every point counts, it makes sense that predictability is the safest option.

If all of us are conditioned to merely read and execute directions, are we learning to think for ourselves at all, or just learning to follow the rules? The point of a liberal arts education isn’t just mastery of methods; it is the ability to move between methods, to subvert them, and to invent new ones when none of them fit.

Of course, beginners need structure, and frameworks are important because they expand your perception. But if our grading system rewards following the formula and never outgrowing it, then Harvard is only doing half of a liberal arts education. The other half is valuing what we do once we move beyond the framework. Picasso could draw like a realist; that’s what made his abstract art a powerful choice.

So whose job is it to break the mold? Claybaugh has encouraged professors to “define for themselves what extraordinary work would be.” They can choose to reserve the A for work that masters a framework and then pushes past it. Administrators can protect the seminars and assignments that reward risk, rather than letting every course drift toward exams with one right answer. Students can take the class where they don’t know the formula yet.

Then again, why listen to me? Figure it out for yourself.

Tara G. Malhotra ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Cabot House.