In his 1969 Dean's Report, Sizer wrote: "At the School of Education, we criticize academic standardization in schools- yet too often we engage in it ourselves. We not only organize ourselves conventionally; we prescribe, with little justification, a set number of courses of similar length taught in relatively similar patterns for all students. The eight-half-course/two-term model, which individual faculty strive mightily to subvert, is clearly inadequate to our needs and inconsistent with our rhetoric."

Moreover, the proliferation of separate degree programs that occurred during the School's dramatic growth has resulted in both duplicated efforts and instability and a lack of cohesion among splinter programs staffed by as few as one or two faculty and vulnerable to shifts in faculty interest and availability.

In his 1969 Report. Sizer added, "When we contemplate changing courses and the grading system, we cannot proceed incrementally. A single radical change is needed, for all the various pieces fit inextricably together."

Last week's policy committee report emphasizes the need for a "division of labor" among the various ed. schools in the country, "since the educational needs of this society far exceed any one institution's capacity to deal with all of them."

The report recommends "a set of priorities for the next years, based on a judgment of what the country needs and what this school can do well . . . given its location, traditions, and existing commitments to faculty members and students."

The report also advocates "a small number of well-staffed programs" organized, as current programs are, around "shops"- which Sizer describes as "a small group of faculty and students with its own general area and direction of inquiry, its own office space, and its own coffee pot and bag lunches."

The proposed shops are in Humanities, Human Development, Childhood Education, Learning Environments, Public Psychology, and Administration and Social Policy.

The policy committee hopes the reorganization into fewer shops will reassert the School's aim of producing "educational clinicians" skilled in both theoretical and practical approaches to education. "A clinician," Sizer said, "is a master craftsman, but in a setting which is itself in a state of change.

"But he must be close to the 'problems of the craft' and constantly questioning that setting itself," he explained.

While focusing on general goals, the Ed School report also urges an increase in student freedom to develop individual study plans.

The Learning Environments shop would primarily concern itself with the total effects of the educational setting on a child's ability to learn. It is meant to develop ways to make those settings, whether classrooms or storefront schools, more conducive to learning.

The report urges that the study of curriculum content be subordinated to investigations of, and the training of students to deal with, the impact of a school's social structure- the so-called "hidden curriculum."

This move away from subject-matter shops will lead to a one-year moratorium on admissions to doctoral programs in Social Studies, Education, Language and Literature Education, Science Education, Mathematical Education, and Curriculum and Supervision if the report passes. These are the major fields hit by the recommended reduction in Ed School programs and the source of the greatest controversy.

The Learning Environments shop also provides a broader recognition of "what students and teachers bring to the setting in the form of values, attitudes, and psychological stages of development," and takes all these factors into account in constructing new curriculum materials.

Learning Environments, together with the newly proposed Childhood Education shop, would become a home for faculty and students interested primarily in curriculum planning and implementation. At the same time, Learning Environments directs the greatest shift away from the subject-matter oriented shops, like math and English teacher training programs, where these students and faculty were previously the most involved.