Last year the Graduate School of Education appointed a senate committee to study, in Dean Sizer's words, "how this faculty..., with its own set of strengths and weaknesses, could best use its resources to illumine and improve the quality education." Financed by a $25,000 grant from the Carnegie Fundation, the committee conidered everything from the mild-reforms to the most radical. After it had reached a consensus, German Israel Scheffler drafted a report that was released last week now it will be debated by the faculty. Excerpts from the Scheffler Report appear below.

Abolishing the Ed School

It might be argued, to begin with, that the very existence of independent Graduate School Education is unwarranted, that the effort to form a broad conception of educational study the basis of an institutional unit of the university had best abandoned in favor of a deliberate fragmentation of such by and its absorption by other branches of the university. The various scholarly and research disciplines now represented the School could well, it might be thought, be returned to several Arts and Science departments with which they are naturally affiliated and could continue, from there, to apply themselves to the sphere of education. The preparation of pacers is a function that might also, in certain respects, be allocated to departments (e.g. guidance to psychology or social relations; teachers' methods courses to the various subject departments) and, in other respects, be made the province of a all interdepartmental committee (e.g. to administer practice thing and supervise the satisfaction of certification requirements). Such an arrangement, it might be pointed out, has an obvious superiority over the present one in point of economy of art and money: The enormous energies required to organize, staff and administer a graduate professional school would no longer need to be expended.... The university could discharge responsibilities to education (so it might be concluded) in a much more economical way, by splintering the study of education and reassigning the fragments.

Such an argument seems to us fatally defective for a variety reasons. The projected alternative would utterly destroy the opportunities for continuous confrontations between educational-relevant academic specialties, educational technology, professional practice, and the living problems of school and community. Such confrontations constitute the major channel through which university research and scholarship are linked with the practical enterprises of men. To destroy this channel would, no doubt, result in economies; it would also, however, surely prevent the university from a proper fulfillment of its responsibilities.

To abolish the School would effectively remove the university from engagement with the profession as well as from any serious enterprise of professional training. Such training simply cannot be properly conducted by one or two designated persons or by a small Arts and Science committee, nor can such a Committee command the requisite energy and range for maintaing relationships with schools and school people. To fragment the School and absorb it into the departments would, moreover, change the whole quality of the enterprise. In the Arts and Science fram-work, where the dominant ethos is that of advanced research and scholarship, the outlook of professional education would be relegated to a lower rank. Nor is it clear that the departments would welcome the newer responsibilities which the projected arrangement envisages for them, quite apart from the question whether they are equipped to discharge these responsibilities effectively. It is unlikely, in our view, that even the natural applications of the scholarly disciplines to education would be adequately fostered by the departments alone, much less that methods courses for teachers would be seriously undertaken; it is, in our opinion, fantastic to imagine that abolution of the School would diffuse educational interest throughout the university. Nor would there be a provision of opportunity for conversation and cooperative work between specialists separated by departmental walls, though severally interested in educational applications. Without a School, finally, there could be no coherent and independent policy of staffing, of recruitment of students, nor of long-term research planning, nor would there be room for an independent administrative initiative for which the concerns of education were primary...

Challenge, Orientation, Priorities

...The need for universities is to be inventive in defining the future before it is upon us: to create new fundamental ideas adequate to the times, while fostering and disseminating the old virtues of critical thought in dealing with them. We cannot, in short, think of the School of Education as simply training functionaries for an ongoing system. We need rather to relate the School bodly to the strangenesses and opportunities of the new world: to encourage it to create new patterns and roles of endeavor, to educate the public and raise the standards of the profession, while holding fast to the tried values of critical humanism that form the core of university life.

What then, in sum, do we recommend, as to orientation? The guiding conception of educational study to which our school has in recent years been committed seems to us fundamentally sound, its broad interpretation of education superior to any alternative that we have considered. The policy of cultivating diverse approaches and outlooks seems to us healthy, and indeed essential for continued health. Such features of the School need, however, to be strengthened and further developed; they require our continuing efforts to support and expand their application in all phases of the School's work, for they represent; ideals which we have, unfortunately, hardly realized fully in practice. We believe, moreover, that the attempt to provide advanced scholarship, training, and professional leadership of the first importance in the future orientation of the School, and requires a reevaluation of its main priorities....

...To devote our energies to the project of producing large numbers of teachers for the lower schools seems to us an inefficient use of our capabilities.... We recommend a substantial reduction in the number of Masters' degree candidates....

The bulk of our efforts should thus be devoted to doctoral training, and the general climate of the School according shifted in the direction of advanced studies. We propose that the Ed.M, in the scholarly or disciplinary fields and the general Ed.M. be given up, or else radically restricted, since they are, at best, stepping stones to doctoral study, and do not, in themselves, generally represent a clear and "terminal" level of professional competence. The exploratory function which they sometimes fulfill for students who are as yet undecided about doctoral study can be equally well fulfilled by graduate study without matriculation for a degree. The presumption should then be, as it is generally understood to be in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, that in the academic or scholarly fields, the Masters' degree is insignificant, and it is rather the Doctors' degree that sets the operative goals and standards.

Is Education a Science

We reject the notion of a special science of education as a basis for integration. Such a notion has, on occasion, been looked to as the basis for an independent status for Schools of Education, or, at the least, as providing the common core of the work of such schools. Such hopes for a science of educations seem to us to rest on quicksand.....

A science is counted by its peculiar ideas, instruments, and procedures but, most importantly, by its distinctive laws and theories. Education has no such distinctive laws and theories. To be sure, educational phenomena may be studied in a scientific manner, but the current attempts to study education scientifically proceed from a wide variety of directions, and utilize a multiplicity of concepts, procedures, and research styles. It is unlikely in the extreme that they will all coalesce into, or be superseded by, a unified educational science.

On the other hand, any advance in these general approaches is likely to benefit the enterprise of studying education scientifically. It is the latter enterprise, after all, that is, and should be, our basic concern. Whether we have one or many sciences, whether or not any of these is specifically a science of education, is irrelevant to the possibility of studying education in a scientific spirit. And the fact is that this possibility can be, and is being, realized in diverse ways, in accordance with various research models and investigative styles....

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