At registration this fall, 491 students indicated an interest in teaching for HUT. Yet at the present time, there are only 35 active teachers. This situation reflects a major problem which PBH now faces in its HUT program.
The Screening
The screening of volunteers is one of the most troublesome aspects of the HUT program. Frequently a school system will accept student volunteers only on a tentative basis, ready to "fire" them on a moment's notice. Meeting this problem has consistently been a worry to PBH, since a single bad experience may build serious pressures for PBH to drop its program in that area.
Formerly, HUT attempted to screen volunteers on the dubious assumption that Group I and II students were ipso facto poor risks. One of the first accomplishments of last year's chairman, Charles Hanson '63-3, was to eliminate this wishful fallacy of academic snobbishness. With the end of academic exclusiveness, HUT has gained many "magnificent teachers," according to one school superintendent. John Limbert '64, last year's HUT vice-chairman, described the interviewing of prospective volunteers: "If a volunteer is articulate, we see if there is a place for his skill. If he has some good ideas as to what he wants to do with his subject, then we ask a final question; would he make a good teacher?
"The whole process is very subjective, but we have to be. We're dealing with a very delicate situation."
Transformation
Because of its past exclusiveness HUT has not been structured to accomodate the large number of volunteers now seeking to work with it. Of all the PBH committees, HUT alone does not have a system of coordinators to supervise volunteers in the field. In the past, it has not needed any, but feeling is now running strong that if PBH ever expects to accomodate as large a number of volunteers in HUT as in its other programs, then it will have to restructure HUT.
The current HUT experience has proved valuable to those in it; PBH intends to make it more so for more students.
HUT's immediate future seems bright; schools systems who use it have begun to praise it to other systems. Requests for information have come from as far away as Kansas. And the Harvard School of Education has thrown its support fully behind the program.
Indications are that volunteering is very much alive at the University, a fact which President Pusey called proud attention to in last year's Baccalaureate address. Indications are that HUT, with small structural improvements, will become one of PBH's most valuable activities.
HUT has now passed its initial period, and is trying to develop a more permanent structure that will advance its dual goals of benefiting the schools and volunteers. In the belief that teaching is one of the most valuable types of volunteer experience, PBH has recently refused HUT permission to solicit funds for paying its volunteers.
As one teacher has said of his HUT experience, "It's like another education. I'm doing this because I'm here on scholarship and this is one way I can repay a debt"