Word: peterkin
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...better proof of the vitality of the system may be found, however, in the matter in which emphasis has shifted of late from the problem of building a tutorial system to that of keeping one. And even to Mr. Peterkin, the latest commentator, this does not mean that the goal has been achieved, that all that remains to be done is to nurse and fondle any full-fledged academic child. It means rather that in the opinion of the tutors, as in that of the undergraduates and in that of the Faculty, the progress that has been made suffices...
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...
...easy to bear with Mr. Peterkin, for he is but elaborating a problem that has been at the core of the system and its administration ever since their inception. It is in the remedies suggested that difference of opinion will creep in. Mr. Peterkin proposes two, in one of which the tutorial system is to be regarded, as training school for professors, with the better tutors allowed to combine the two kinds of work, with gradual promotion to professorial ranks no their goal...
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...