Today, American colleges and universities are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, nncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truism the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse. One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the 13th century. This time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and mru to methods that really work. One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Even simply payirig attention is difficult. Many students believe years of watching TV has sabotaged their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think. Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform. experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have net yet fully learned how to learn. While it's true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker' s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college career. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word. The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. If lectures make no sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than a discussion class. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture sys- tem alive and well. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as the students can pretend to learn by attending lectures. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students' passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor's. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what--before final exam, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth. Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students educational career--during the first 2 years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restricted to junior and senior undergraduates and to graduate students, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to pr