Better Groundwork

AN experiment combining some aspects of Dartmouth's regular freshman counseling program with the required first-year course, "The Individual and the College," has been undertaken this fall in an effort to strengthen both and to see if freshmen cannot acquire more speedily the maturity and adjustment to college life that will be called for when Dartmouth's new educational program goes into effect next fall.

The experiment is being carried out with a group of 120 freshmen, one-sixth of the class, and a control group selected by the random method. The rest of the class will also be used in the comparison of data at the end of the test period. The experiment is being underwritten by Rodman C. Rockefeller '54 of New York City.

A weakness of the counseling system has been the lack of a common ground between adviser and advisee, and "The Individual and the College" as an all-lecture course has had a somewhat passive nature. Under the experimental program bringing the two together, the faculty advisers attend the course lectures and later meet with their freshman advisees in small groups or individually to discuss the problems confronting college students. Some of these problems, covered in the course, relate to conformity, aggressions, escapism, the psychology and physiology of drinking, sex and aesthetic and religious values.

The College hopes that discussions of the course contents will provide the needed common ground between freshmen and their advisers, who have been given some specific training in counseling skills as part of the program. An important by-product, it is believed, will be the improvement of the teacher's insight into his students and a consequent improvement of his teaching.

But beyond the considerations of betteradjusted freshmen, better counseling and better teachers is* the aim of promoting in Dartmouth undergraduates the maturity as persons and the independence as students that will contribute greatly to the success of the three-term, three-course program to be launched next fall. That program will endeavor to shift the emphasis from teaching to independence in learning - eliminating the educational crutches of teacher and textbook, as Dean Jensen puts it —and a great deal will depend on student maturity and a rapid adjustment to college life by those beginning it. On the basis of this semester's experiment, the College hopes to devise a freshman program that will help assure the success of the new curriculum.