THE 2013 Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference, held at the university on May 8, demonstrated commendable interest across the disciplines in improving the quality of undergraduate education at Harvard.
There were, however, some notable instances of neglect and some important misfires. I commented on a summary of the proceedings included in Harvard Magazine. Here is my note:
There was much of value in the HILT conference: perhaps most notably, nourishing “the virtues of deep patience and close attention.” That such virtues are “no longer available in nature as [students experience it]” is a surprising comment by Jennifer Rogers, an art historian at Harvard. Nature is abundantly available, even in Cambridge, and always repays deep patience and close attention. Everything in nature takes time to see, no less than a work of art, and the joys of both can be astonishing and complementary.
Evidently entirely missing from the conference proceedings, if one is to judge from the account in Harvard Magazine, was serious consideration of students’ emotional and spiritual development. Perhaps that critical dimension of education was considered appropriate to earlier centuries at Harvard, say the 18th or 19th, but not the 21st, replete as it is with demands for cognitive skills and the assimilation of information.
When someone says “teachers’ obligations extend to helping students make the choice between ‘being' and ‘doing,’ one must cry foul. Being and doing are best conceived as complementary: "making something of their lives in service [to] the world” and “deep devotion to others” are hardly obstacles to good education. They are part and parcel of “the undergraduate rite of passage.” Without them the relationship of teachers and students, however rich in cognition, risks dessication.