Too Many Eager Beavers?

The young president of Sarah Lawrence College (for bluestocking young ladies--usually stockingless) is Harold Taylor, 33. His youth has never stopped him from sounding off to his elders. A month ago, he leveled at the Great Books program for concentrating too much on dead letters. Last week, at New York's twelfth annual Educational Conference, he berated the whole U.S. educational system. Said he: "[It] has become one massive quiz program, with the prizes and the honors going to the most . . . repulsively well-informed persons. The man with his hand up first wins the scholarship, is asked to make the commencement speech, is voted the boy most likely to succeed. . . . Our educational system seems now designed to create a race of eager beavers.

"Individual education could be dealt with more significantly . . . if we removed the entire mechanical engine of credits, grade points, formal examinations and required courses. This arithmetical approach . . . values accuracy and correctness above imagination."

Taylor's recommendations: 1) abolish lectures; 2) distribute copies of what the lecturer would have said, and let it be mulled over in small discussion groups; 3) help each student to "find a set of values in which he can believe and by which he can act in this world."

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