VENTURE IN EDUCATION
Sellery, G. C.
Venture in Education ESSAYS IN TEACHING. Edited by Harold Taylor, President, Sarah Lawrence College. Harper, 239 pp. $3. Reviewed by G. C. Sellery THIS is a valuable book, rich in suggestions for...
...A few fanciful characterizations of the larger universities are psychologically interesting: "For most of those enrolled in the large institutions where mass education methods are used, the motivation lies in a firmly held set of material aims . . ." "The scholars and scientists, busy with their own private researches, arrange themselves in hierarchies of rank, so that those with the highest rank and the greatest number of books or pamphlets printed can give the least number of hours to the students...
...Each consists of one discussion per week— only occasionally is it a lecture—with a class of 10 or 12 students, followed by an individual conference or conferences for each student, lasting from a half to three-quarters of an hour weekly or bi-weekly...
...The format of the volume is comely and the index good...
...There are no final examinations in the courses...
...but the cumulative file of reports turned in by the teachers and the adviser to the Faculty Committee furnishes an adequate basis of judgment for promotion or for tactful exclusion...
...There are no academic ranks at Sarah Lawrence...
...A person trained in academic custom, whose blood has been drained away by the ordeal of the Ph.D., either gives comments upon the text or repeats the text as a lecture...
...Only rarely do students expect to get light from the past for the present or the future "in the history classroom...
...The essays number 13, illustrating how students gain insight through the various subjects commonly taught in the better colleges...
...The students at Sarah Lawrence carry three courses per term (three terms per academic year...
...Reviewed by G. C. Sellery THIS is a valuable book, rich in suggestions for inspired teach-, ing, written by 12 of the teachers of Sarah Lawrence College...
...The college has a superior staff, the proportion of teachers to students is higher than in the universities, and the size of the classes is a teacher's dream...
...Historians are trained to investigate the details of history, not to investigate its meaning...
...the staff is composed of "teachers...
...these useful means of correlation are officially regarded as obstacles to progress...
...There can be no doubt that the Sarah Lawrence scheme is a successful one...
...The catalogue for 1950-51 outlines the academic career of each teacher, with his college and university degrees...
...The characterizations quoted above are really only an artistic backdrop...
...To them history is a series of dates and battles to be memorized...
...The three most impressive essays are entitled "The Teacher and the Student," "Experience in Philosophy," and "Education and the Family...
...In addition to the conferences with her teachers, the student has regular conferences with her adviser, locally known as her don, whose function it is to help her plan her program and to guide her in the acquisition of knowledge, maturity and usefulness...
...The last essay is devoted to the praiseworthy end of telling the large universities how they can make use of the methods followed at Sarah Lawrence...
...but there is no indication of when he got his degrees or when he joined the staff of Sarah Lawrence, so that the reviewer is largely in the dark as to his relative importance...
...This college and Bennington are the two small institutions which have gone farthest in this country in organizing the broad education of girls around their primary interests, on the tutorial basis, and with the line between the curricular and the extracurricular substantially obliterated...
...Grades are not given, but reports are made to the important Faculty Committee on Student Work, which meets every week to study the progress which the students have made in incorporating into their own outlook or attitude the values which the courses offered...
...The Essays are a treasure house of pedagogical lore...
Vol. 15 • February 1951 • No. 2
