Word: tutor
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Indeed Mr. Peterkin writes with the salutary advantage of criticism as his major promise. He is concerned primarily with the future of the tutor. "As the system now stands," he says, "tutoring in English presents itself to the tutor as a cul de sac, since it appears to lead nowhere, either at Harvard or else-where." Such a situation is one that menaces the system. For if both remuneration and prospects are slight, the talent attracted will be slight, the services of graduate students will be required, and the principal advantages and merits of the system will be vitiated...
That such a scheme as this can be advanced at all must be deplorable. The tutorial system at Harvard has always been based on the assumption that it was not a subsidiary department, but a parallel one. It has always been assumed that the tutor was to contribute something to the education of the student which he could not obtain from the work which he did in courses. To establish a graded system of promotion from the ranks of tutors to the rostra of lecture balls would destroy this primary purpose of the system. It would substitute for the better...
...other plan advanced in the article is one by which tutors would be graded among themselves. Prospects and, it is to be presumed, remuneration would be graded similarly. This would solve the problem in so far as it concerns a need for ambition. The tutor could strive to elevate himself in the standing. As far as the actual compensation is concerned, even his suggestion is driven back to the meltable plea for more funds, The Harvard Fund is symptomatic of a desirable change that is indeed taking place in the collection of funds for the University, but how long...
Both suggestions, however, reveal an attitude toward the function of the tutor that is in many significant points at variance with that which must be held its ideal. Mr. Peterkin attributes to the Crimson the desire that the tutorial relationship should be "something more than a merely educational one". Such a statement as this is in itself innocuous, but when Mr. Peterkin goes on to declare that the tutor "has it in his power to influence not merely the intellectual tastes of his men but their character and their standards of conduct", he is expressing his own opinion. That...
Confronted with such a tutorial relationship as Mr. Peterkin suggests, it would be only reasonable for any student to rebel. The difficulty of securing tutors with the necessary intellectual equipment for their task is certainly serious enough without adding to it the qualifications of character, tact, or sympathy with the student's personal problems. The individual problem, similarly, is such that there seems no adequate reason for adding to the tutor's responsibility over his charges...