A Container to Fit the Contained

In leadership and innovation, four U.S. schools of education stand out:

Harvard, Stanford, Chicago and Columbia Teachers. Of the four, the Harvard Graduate School of Education is currently taking the boldest measures to cope with education's imponderable future. A yearlong, soul-searching study recently examined the school's aims and responsibilities--and last week the school dedicated a new building in which, as Architect William W. Caudill put it, "the container fits the contained."

The new Roy Edward Larsen Hall is named for a former president of the

Harvard Board of Overseers, a member of the first White House Conference on Education, and organizer of the National Citizens Commission for the Pub lic Schools--a "kind of symbol of the lay person who has been concerned for the future of education," as Harvard President Nathan Pusey put it at the dedication.* Architecturally, the building's distinction is its flexibility. Such immovable objects as stairs, elevators and ventilating shafts are arranged along the outer walls, leaving unobstructed central floor space on its eight levels so that inner partitions can be shifted at will. A few small outer win dows provide uniquely framed views of Cambridge. Caudill, a Houston architect, delighted last week in reciting the conflicting terms already applied to the building: "Mosque modern, modern medieval, warm, cold, beautiful, nauseating, traditional, original, a genial robot, and an IBM card in 3-D."

Saved from Scrapping. The new building befits a school probing new approaches to the teaching of teachers and the edification of educators. Opened in 1920, the school has long been scattered about the Harvard campus. It lingered in a state so lowly, compared with such Harvard professional schools as law and medicine, that President James B. Conant considered scrapping it in the mid-'30s. He kept it, however, and in 1948 appointed Francis Keppel, then 32 (now Assistant Secretary for

Education), as its dean. The school has been on the upbeat ever since.

Keppel doubled the size of the school's faculty, pioneered in bringing outside professors into the education faculty to break the hold of the educationists. He organized a cooperative program with 30 of the top liberal-arts colleges in the U.S. to funnel some of their most talented graduates into professional education via Harvard's graduate school. After Keppel moved on in 1962 to become U.S. Commissioner of Education, another brilliant young innovator, Theodore Sizer, now 33, succeeded him as dean, and continued the push toward making education a major concern of all of Harvard's academic disciplines.

Today 35 of the school's 91 faculty members hold joint appointments with other Harvard faculties, and eleven other members are also officials of public and independent schools in the Boston area. The aim has been to draw the practicing educator, the pedagogical scholar, the historian, the philosopher and the social scientist together in an ever broadening concept of what to teach the school's 800 students. Ever since Harvard started its Master of Arts in Teaching degree in 1936, the emphasis has been on fulltime graduate study (as compared with the customary "summer school" advancement) in preparing teachers and education leaders.

Involvement & Aloofness. The broad concept continued with the forward-looking self-analysis prepared by a faculty committee headed by Philosophy Professor Israel Scheffler. It concluded that "education is best conceived as an organizing perspective from which all the problems of culture and learning may be viewed." The committee urged that even greater stress be placed on a full doctoral program, rather than the M.A.T. But it also proposed that up to a full year of practice teaching under supervision should be required.

Shunning the status quo, Dean Sizer insists that Harvard should be concerned with "what schools should be like in the future, and to train people for service in them now." A school of education, he believes, must seek a balance between "the wisdom gained from detachment and that from commitment." The search for the proper mix between necessary involvement in social reform and a more aloof and thoughtful attitude toward education is nothing new, in Sizer's view, but the challenge for Harvard is that "no institution has so far achieved it."

* Larsen, 66 (Harvard, '21), was TIME'S first circulation manager, Time Inc.'s longtime president (1939-60), and is now chairman of the executive committee. Funds for the building, which cost $1.9 million, come from the Federal Government, various foundations, and 100 private donors, most of them friends and admirers of Larsen.

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