There was a time when it took enormous effort to make MIT students comfortable with subjects that had 'not just one right answer'. And so it has become easier to achieve what I think is the real purpose of humanities education at MIT and everywhere, not to train, but to educate."

Herein lies the theme of Pauline Maier on teaching history at MIT. She enjoys the fact that at today's MIT, undergraduates enthusiastically embrace subjects other than electrons and bits. In fact, Maier finds her current crop of students keen, curious and capable of engaging in the spirited discussions about ethics or patriotism she cultivates in her intimate history classes. Maier so trusts her students’ ability to wrestle with ideas that she rejects lecture entirely in favor of seminars. Her course on the American Revolution relies heavily on documents – minutes from the meetings of local resistance groups, broadsides by royalists, first and second drafts of the Declaration of Independence. She also gives students contemporary articles, such as the work in progress on an Iraqi constitution. While we can’t escape the perspective of our times, Maier says, we must learn what’s distinctive about the past, to gain an appreciation of what is distinctive about the present.