Word: programers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Unfortunately for both Harvard and the General Education program, little is likely to come of Professor Murdock's recent expression of interest in Advanced Placement exams to exempt students from General Education courses. The compromise between "liberal education" and a modified distribution requirement which is the foundation of the General Education program is so uneasy that any attempt to disturb it will encounter opposition from some quarter, and any sort of exemption would require a revision of basic philosophy...
Nevertheless, the suggestion is significant and worth serious consideration. It would help realize some of the program's oldest aims, and might well provoke a much-needed look at the real objectives of General Education...
...immediate difficulty is the actual process of exemption. Harvard's program is unique, and it would be virtually impossible to get a national testing program. The tests would have to be written, administered, and graded by the General Education Committee or the Advanced Placement Office, and neither would especially relish...
...there is a problem of policy which will probably prevent the solution of the mechanical difficulties: a large group connected with General Education feels that the program is really a three-course venture into liberal education, and that to issue an exemption because a student had once had other liberal education would be ridiculous...
...necessary evil, but a positive good; to make General Education the first step in the creation of a liberal arts college, or even a compromise with that end would be a radical and undesirable change. Rather, General Education should be what it was designed to be: a liberalized distribution program which recognizes that its participants will never study the areas of human knowledge in toto, and tries to impart a general understanding of them...