Scheffler Report Will Chart the Future Of University's School of Education

The Graduate School of Education will begin its 46th year next fall in the midst of an identity crisis. Basic questions of goals and methodology will be debated by the faculty, and the result may be reorganization of the the school's curriculum and structure.

Through the year, an eleven-man "Committee on the Graduate Study of Education" has met every Wednesday; last week it held a two-day windup session. Aided by a $25,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, committee members have visited schools of education across the country and invited specialists to Cambridge for consultation. Meanwhile, a permanent research staff has written hundreds of pages on the historical development of the ed school and summarized earlier studies by other universities and the federal government.

Now Israel Scheffler, the committee's chairman, will write a summary report, which will undergo further polishing by the committee--which includes Dean Theodore R. Sizer--and then be distributed. The report will almost certainly be published in book form, but there is some sentiment for delaying this until the faculty acts upon it.

Scheffler, who became the first Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education and Philosophy last Fall, has specialized in the sort of issues involved in re-evaluating the Ed School. His books include The Language of Education and a recently completed work on the relationship between epistemology and the philosophy of education. A member of the Faculties of Education and of Arts and Sciences, he has been at Harvard since 1952.

Since the committee, in his words, is trying "to pose radical questions to ourselves about what the Ed School ought to be doing," Scheffler's report is expected to look well beyond Harvard. Dean Sizer explains that it will consider schools of education in general and the place of such schools in any major private university. Specific recommendations for Harvard will thus be placed within a larger framework.

Scheffler distinguishes three "traditions" that all ed schools have "inherited," and points out that some system of priorities must be established. First historically came the tradition of teacher training, as in the normal school. At Harvard, the Master of Education and Master of Arts in Teaching programs prepare college graduates who plan to teach in elementary and secondary schools.

Another tradition is that of research and scholarship; the Ed School describes its offerings in this area as "programs leading to specialization in education," and stresses testing and curriculum construction. Scheffler believes that too many discussions of education have centered around teacher training and feels that "there is a lot to be said for the other side--what education needs first is some emphasis on scholarship."

Finally, there is the tradition of community service. Harvard's Center for Research and Development on Educational Differences, which cooperates with a dozen local school systems in studying such problems as the effects of a student's background on his desire to learn, partly exemplifies the service tradition. Scheffler emphasizes that, through programs like this, professional schools can act as the "sense organs of a university," that they can be "feeding points where problems come in" and theory is tested against practice.

No one except Scheffler knows what his report will say. It is extremely doubtful, however, that any one of the three traditions will be given prominence to the exclusion of the others. Some startling suggestions were made at committee meetings during the year--abolishing the Ed School, for example--but none of the committee's members, according to Scheffler, is an extremist. "There was a substantial feeling that there is value in trying to bring the three interpretations under one roof, and trying to develop them in conjunction with one another," he recalls.

Dean Sizer's timetable calls for final approval of the Scheffler report by the end of the 1965-66 academic year; but it has had at least one pre-publication effect. After the committee's discussions showed agreement on that the faculty organize itself into the question, Dean Sizer proposed six areas, and the faculty, at its April meeting, agreed. The new structure will go into effect next Fall, for an experimental period of one year.

While not increasing the faculty's administrative powers, it will enable groups of teachers in each area to express a unified viewpoint and allow a freer flow of information between areas. Three of the faculty groupings will be "disciplinary"--humanities, social sociences (sociology), and psychology. Each member of the faculty will belong to two groups.

Together with this innovation will go two other changes, one bureaucratic and one physical, also designed to improve communications. The faculty's system of standing committees has been revised, in order to deal with the suggestions that are expected to emerge from the area groups. (The Scheffler Committee will metamorphose into a permanent committee on academic policy.) And over the summer, the Ed School will move into its red-brick Roy E. Larsen Tower, which features "department centers" on each floor. The centers--already christened "water holes"--include kitchenettes, and large windows; they are designed to encourage informal shop talk.

Sizer says he expects the Scheffler Report to provide the same sort of interest in his faculty that the Doty Report did this year in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. If the Scheffler Report does make a bold break with the past, it seems certain to be a hot topic of conversation in many places beside the water holes on Appian Way.