Word: musts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...part of the General Education program provokes as much troubled thought as the natural science courses, for teaching science is essentially a different task from teaching humanities or social sciences. Science, even as introduced in a basic course, brings one to the edge of a study where physical intuition must give way to mathematical systems, where questions of reality are abandoned for models which "work"; in short the questions asked by science are fundamentally different from those posed by other disciplines...
...University must first ask itself: is science worth teaching to the non-scientist? The answer seems definitely yes. On the one hand, Harvard graduates are socially critical people, and trite though it may sound, a rudimentary knowledge of science helps provide insight in dealing with political and social issues which scientific developments continually thrust upon us. Just as important, however, is that Harvard's claim to turn out graduates with a modicum of education seems only justified if students are introduced to the basic approaches of science...
...present Natural Sciences program does not seem the best way to endow the student with this basic knowledge. The non-science concentrator must be introduced into the process of hypothesis and experiment and must realize that the claims of science are limited: that measurement is always inexact; that the constructs it offers are not images of "reality" but working models for prediction; that statements are true until controverted by further sense data. The best way to appreciate this is not to learn about science but to learn science itself...
...Both students and faculty must feel agreeable to all decisions that are made," Washburn continued. "Compromises must be true ones; not ones in which students reluctantly assent to faculty decisions...
Miss Blanchard, vice-president of the Harvard Opera Guild, felt, on the other hand, that "students must have a chance to learn by carrying on all operations themselves, even if they make mistakes." "The most exciting element of Harvard drama today is that students practically run it themselves," she said...