Page:Catalogue of St. John's College 1945.pdf/7

24 about recapitulations of history, but it happens to catch any genuine values that such a theory may point out in practice.

There are certain critical questions raised by the use of a selected book list. A great many of these questions turn out to be questions of private taste and sentiment. Among the objective questions the most urgent concern the omission of the Oriental classics of the pure fine arts.

Two reasons may be given for omitting the Oriental classics. They are culturally and linguistically unavailable to us of the Occidental world; they are therefore subject to almost inevitable corruption and misuse as educational mediums. We moderns may be able to exploit them when our own intellectual disciplines have been recovered.

The fine arts contain the most imposing set of disciplines that have established themselves and survived in the modern world by claiming independence from the liberal arts. It is one of our aims to recover and reintegrate them with the liberal arts. We are therefore providing for them outside the curriculum and planning to reassimilate them by stages, first by including music in the curriculum, reading musical scores in the seminars, and studying harmony in the laboratory. We hope that by this and other stages to follow, intellectual light will be transmitted to the fine arts and that they may make their reflected light available to all the classics.

The main emphasis in teaching is on the writing, reading, and experimental disciplines, but the actual teaching falls into five sharply distinguished kinds of teaching techniques. None of these is newly discovered or invented, but some of them have been in disrepute for fairly long periods. We call them severally Seminar, Formal Lecture, Language Tutorial, Mathematics Tutorial, and Laboratory. The seminar comes perhaps nearest to the immediate educational end which we are aiming at, while the tutorials, laboratories, and lectures make secondary contributions.

The Tutorials
Every good student knows that his learning must be double. He must be acquiring the skills that go with the subject matter, but he must also get to know his teacher. The converse of this is even more important for good teaching: the good teacher knows that he must be in the learning process himself and he must also know his pupil. The tutorial class, which is composed of not more than ten students meeting five times a week, provides the ideal conditions for collaborative study and for the manifold teaching and learning relations that hold in a company of good friends. The tutor makes daily diagnostic observations of each student as he works and gives the proper prescriptive directions as they are needed. There is also an opportunity for each student to contribute his measure of instruction to his fellows.

The Language Tutorial
The aim here is to use some external device that will induce the strengthening and disciplining of the imagination. Foreign languages have often been praised for their mental discipline, but the vagueness of the statement mirrors the decay of a pedagogical technique. The imagination is the place where the intellect touches human experience, but it cannot do its work if the imagination is not prepared to receive intellectual light. It must be polished and adjusted. Normally it is our mother tongue that brings about such preparation as we have. Unfortunately American habits with the mother tongue are for various reasons abnormal and we have babbling minds as a consequence. Special attention must be given to our linguistic habits if we are to improve matters. Liberal artists have always known the powerful effects of foreign language in getting this kind of attention. We therefore require the study of four foreign languages, one a year for the four years, Greek, Latin, French and German.

It is obvious that we do not expect to have these languages mastered in the time allotted, even though it is five hours a week. For each year the schedule is as follows. During the first term paradigms of declensions and conjugations, and passages of good prose and poetry from the books are committed to memory by rote. During the period of elective and progressive education, rote memory has been abhorred because it has its dangers. In our system these dangers are avoided by devices that force memory to carry its proper load of imagination and