The Education of a Freshman

IF you had the chance to talk to the entire freshman class at Dartmouth - to give them the benefit of your experience and your advice at the outset of their college careers in Hanover - what would you say to them?

During the past semester, in the inaugural term of the new required freshman course, The Individual and the College, fifteen guest lecturers had such a chance to talk to the freshmen, some on very specific topics, others more generally. Presented here are excerpts from two of these talks, given near the end of the course by Dr. Alan Gregg, Vice President .of the Rockefeller Foundation, and by Amos N. Blandin Jr. '18, Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, both received by the men of 1958 with special enthusiasm. Requests that the recorded talks be printed for class distribution were made by an impressive number of students.

The Individual and the College is almost certainly this year's most important educational innovation at Dartmouth. The two talks which follow tell a great deal about the potential that the course has for orienting and stretching freshman minds at the outset of the college experience. We print them not only as an inside look at an important new part of the Dartmouth educational program, but also because they make stimulating reading and will set alumni as well as freshmen to thinking.