The Roads of Learning

Harvard's much-advertised experiment in courses that cut across fields will not get going until next fall. Columbia College* has been doing it for 27 years. Last week Columbia took stock, announced to Harvard and the rest of the world that the scheme works fine.

A two-year course in Contemporary Civilization has been required at Columbia since 1919. Now two other cut-across courses, Science (started in 1934) and Humanities (1937) will be required of all freshmen and sophomores, leaving them almost no time for elective courses until their junior year. In a brief, highly readable report edited by Historian Jacques Barzun (A College Program in Action; Columbia University Press; $2), Columbia also announced that it would:

P: Tighten entrance requirements to exclude "mere spectators"; screen all students after sophomore year, to push overboard those "whose grip upon the railing of intellectual life [seems] weak."

P: Grade all students on how, as well as what, they write. Said the committee: "The writing of a very large proportion of our American high school graduates is bad writing. . . ."

P: Require four years of physical education, instead of two--because draft examinations showed what poor physical shape most U.S. boys are in.

P: Introduce a speedup course in foreign languages (ten hours a week), G.I. style.

Concluded the Committee: ". . . The ultimate subject matter of every course is the brain of the man who takes it. ... Our first business is to ... post the roads of learning so that a student may recognize the continuity of the explosive present with the historical past. . . ."

*The undergraduate liberal arts college for men of New York's Columbia University.

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