"Children don't go to school as long as they can endure it, but increasing numbers are interested in staying in high school and going to college," Provost Buck told an annual meeting of the New England School Development Council here last Wednesday evening.

Speaking at a Commander Hotel dinner on the second day of a three-day session, Buck told an audience of small town and city school superintendents that "Harvard's interest in public education is that of an institution interested in all education."

With a million and a half students now in the nation's high schools, Buck predicted that this figure would double in five years, and that with many of this number applying to college, the cleavage between the last year of high school and the first years of college must be effectively bridged.

Earlier in the afternoon at a meeting in Littauer Center, school commissioners from all over New England had expressed grave concern over the current teacher shortage.

But after listening to various solutions, the administrators had the problem tossed right back at them by Ralph Burns, professor of Education at Dartmouth College.

He blamed too much administrative interference for the lack of dignity now invested in the teaching profession.