Late in 1964, a few faculty member and students at the Graduate school of Education met to discuss bring up their own school, complete with their own students and their own curriculum.

They called it the "Crazy School." With it, they could work in complete freedom with children from 6 to 18, from it, they expected to develop a few kind of education that could be expected by schools across the country.

Not the entire group went along with the proposal. The only thing of which everyone agreed was their enchantment with typical educational research, the kind that production an article in an obscure journal were, a minor curriculum change in a cool system there.

Today they agree on little more. But in the past two years their number has grown to 30 and they have lived more than $500,000 in federal ends to see if they can come up with everything better for both researchers and American schools.

And, though they have never agreed in it, the students and professors come preserved their most radical area, the possibility of founding their own school. They call themselves the shadow Faculty.

The project will take away from the school part of the responsibility for teaching humanities and social sciences. "As total institutions," Oliver said, "secondary schools are hopeless. We can leave them the things they teach best--math and science. But it's time we began to let general education wither way."

Their day-to-day activities are hard revolutionary. The Shadow Faculty the largest group within the Ed School's Center for Research and Development, but, even more than the longer groups, it divides its funds long a large number of unrelated subjects ranging from children's literature to report cards.

The odd mix of disciplines gives a Shadow Faculty one advantage. Often all of its members get together, they do every week, they have some the most intensive and wildest on educational research that the school has ever seen. Last winter, fact, the debating got so intensive at the Faculty seriously discussed in the idea of disbanding and forgetting the whole thing.

Much of their debate centers around starting questions first raised two years ago by Donald W. Oliver, proper of Education. Oliver, sitting on committee to draw up qualifications a new professor of secondary education, reported simply that one proper would be nowhere near enough. It was time, he argued, for the Ed school to reevaluate its whole approach to secondary schools.

Oliver was just completing a major research project -- a three-year high school social studies curriculum in rich students were taught how to analyze controversial issues. According to a colleague, Oliver already had questions about the results and was sure that he had accomplished anything significant by developing a since high school curriculum. As he put in a later memorandum:

I do not think it is the role of the university-centered school of education to tinker. Let commercial publishers tinker with materials . . . Let there is colleges and state departments of education tinker with training facilities. But in secondary education -- and perhaps from kindergarten through high school -- let one major private university have the courage to start from the beginning."

And several researchers, even if they did not think it worthwhile to start from the beginning, agreed that the secondary schools needed radical reform. Some felt that high schools trained students for college, mis-educating those who wouldn't get there. Some saw the schools hurting poorer students in more subtle ways, for example, by making it difficult for them to learn to speak and write. Others argued that no attempt was being made to win back students who, for whatever reason, lose interest in their work. All that was needed was something to bring all these researchers together. Oliver's ideas were the beginning.

The group formed a Committee on Secondary Education and started looking for a way to attack the problem of high schools without getting bogged down in the programs of each school system or in the varying interests of each researcher. Their first answer was simple. After testing their ideas for a year in an urban high school, the thirty researchers would retreat to their own model school. Its curriculum would be their own; its student body would be typical of an urban school, some bound for college, and many not. There they would complete their research -- or carry it on indefinitely. It became known as the "Crazy School."

Later, an alternative was proposed. Rather than building their own school, the committee would work closely with an existing school system -- probably a suburban one. They would have their own laboratory, with perhaps 100 students, in which to experiment; then their ideas would be tried out in the schools. The proposal was tagged the "Instant School."

But, either way, their aim was to transform American education. They frequently referred to themselves as "manufacturers." They would first design their product, the new curriculum; test it in a laboratory; then adapt it for a trial assembly line -- the co-operating school system -- and finally, they hoped, for many assembly lines.