THE RICE THRESHER - Rice Scholarship Home - Rice University

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Marsh suggests admission off well-rounded students New methods in social sciences aired
To the Editor:
Your editorial in the March
9 issue entitled "Teaching:
What is it?" tended to transfer
the blame for the problems of
Rice from the students at large,
where it really belongs, to the
faculty and especially to the
administration.
Those olympian creatures inhabiting
the upper reaches of
Lovett Hall are showing more
wisdom in their conservatism
than you would admit.
President Pitzer's decision to
wait until the colleges show
their worth before inundating
them with money for educational
programs is a wise one. The
colleges at Rice are not structured
to deal with education
per se; they have other uses
and an attempt to use them for
education would not be worth
the time, money, or effort.
The whole concept of inter-
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disciplinary education has its
drawbacks, and the idea of college-centered
courses would accentuate
the negative aspects.
The feelings of most students on
this matter is that an interdisciplinary
course would be easier
to study for than a rigorous
treatment of a single subject.
This will be true if a broadbased
course is taught by one
or two teachers. To be effective,
and to be rigorous, such a
course must utilize as many different
teachers as possible so
as to show students all the aspects
of a broad field.
An academ won't get an objective
view of all science from
a chemist, or an S-E won't
learn about music from a philosopher.
The colleges, with
their associates, cannot provide
an education that is both broad
and rigorous; only departments
can do that.
The problem and the solution
of getting students to pursue
education outside their own
narrow specialties lie in the
students themselves. Culture, in
terms of fine arts, is free or
very nearly so; yet it is rare to
.see engineers attending the concerts
or theatrical performances
or browsing through the
art museum just down the
street.
Similarly, there aren't too
many philosophers who can fix
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