More Power To Them: a report of faculty and student experience in the encouragement of student initiative

More Power To Them: a report of faculty and student experience in the encouragement of student initiative is by C.L. Barber. Committee for New College, 1962.

Below are excerpts from the report.

The Circumstances of the Project
The present widespread concern to encourage independent work by undergraduates reflects uneasiness about the effect of our standard system of courses and credits. This report will describe one among several current projects aimed at countering the tendency of our undergraduates to leave too much of the initiative in their education in the hands of their teachers. At Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts, in the academic year 1959-60, twelve faculty members tried out changes in their teaching procedures designed to promote student initiative and independence. The program was an outgrowth of the cooperative effort in planning a new style of college which in the previous year produced the New College Plan. Both projects were sponsored by the four neighboring institutions concerned, and both were supported by grants from the Fund for the Advancement of Education of the Ford Foundation. (p. 5)

The Amateurism of the American Undergraduate, the Course System and the Problem of Initiative
It is our privilege, and our problem, when working with undergraduates, to address ourselves chiefly to people who, except about grades, have an amateur's disinterestedness. But we are pulled towards becoming salesman and/or taskmasters. At their best, our amateur public bestow their attention in an unforced, undutiful way while coming at their studies with their whole humanity; at their worst, they just cannot be bothered. And among individuals some of the best as well as the worst are apt to feel the pull of campus life--all that busy-ness which most students cannot ignore, even if they want to, because it is serious business, since College Life is preparation for Life after College...(p. 52)

The sort of students who arouse our concern here are not those who have taken over the initiative in their intellectual life despite the course system, but the students who are kept going by the course system, and at the same time limited by it. The intelligence and energy of the latter may be as high as any, and they constitute, at most colleges, the great majority of students. The very intensity of our efforts, in courses, to get the most out of them (or do the most for them) tends to take the initiative away from them. We talk at them, we draw them out, we assign readings, we contrive problems, we assign papers. ("There is not enough talk," wrote one of my students in his evaluation, "about the destructiveness of assigning papers.") This problem of the initiative is not one of abuses or stupidities, but of the whole drift of the system...The whole problem is exacerbated by our use of marks for each course, and each task in a course, to enforce standards...(p. 53)

Able teachers have always encouraged independence in their students and sought to avoid emphasis on grades--by the way they present the knowns and unknowns of their subjects, by the questions they ask or do not answer, by the reading they suggest, the problems they assign for papers: Agassiz leaving his students alone for weeks with trays of bones is a fine old example. Exceptional students almost everywhere are excused from much course work, supported in projects. And our undergraduates, on their side, show remarkable integrity and autonomy, again and again, in coping with their situation on the receiving end of the course and grade system. They often take especially difficult courses, or courses for which they have limited aptitude, just to follow their interests. Just because they are amateurs, they have a refreshingly genuine quality of interest--and boredom; and because of their inner independence, they are often more original than the more advanced, professionally-minded student.

But when this has been said, we must come back to the fact that the attitude produced in the average student by taking courses and getting marks tends to be passive. He does his jobs--the assigned jobs--almost like an industrial operative who leaves the planning and engineering of the whole process to somebody else--the faculty. The materials are provided, the tools put in his hands, and he does the job--fast...(p. 54)

Summary and Conclusions
Instructors found that more of their time, rather than less, was required, in some cases much more time; their judgment was that less time would be required to supervise similar independent work in subsequent years, but that there would never be a substantial saving of faculty time...(p. 55)