President Neil L. Rudenstine kicked off a three-day celebration of the Graduate School of Education's 100th anniversary yesterday morning, telling a crowd of more than 400 that his administration intends to work closely with the school to "make things happen."

At the Centennial's opening ceremonies in the Loeb Mainstage Theater, Rudenstine said the Education School functions as a center for discussions of education and is "helping us sort out who is talking to who."

He said he expects the school to take a leadership role in unifying educational research and reform efforts. "Harvard University will be working with the school as strong and as well as we can to make things happen in an exciting way," Rudenstine said.

Rudenstine opened the celebration, which marks the centennial of the University's appointment of its first professor of pedagogy, by remarking on the "different eras of education" that he observed as he was growing up. He used a short motto to summarize the philosophies of each of these eras.

During his years at boarding school in the 1950s, he said, "The impression one got was 'When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you." In the 60s and 70s, in contrast, "We were not sure that we could teach the students anything-and I am reminded of the title of an Ogden Nash poem, Don't Ask Dad-He Won't Know."

And in today's educational community, Rudenstine said, with educators so divided in their opinions and with the resulting lack of communication, "our motto could be, in the words of a very talented woman, Is this the party to whom I am speaking?"

Professor of Education Carol Gilligan also spoke at the Centennial's opening. Gilligan, an internationally known authority on the moral development of women and girls, presented a paper titled "Joining the Resistance."

During her 10 years of work with girls, Gilligan said she has discovered that young girls often have what she calls a "healthy resistance" to psychological illness. At adolescence, however, their world view begins to come into conflict with cultural barriers.

Adolescent girls start to feel the imposition of "a framework not of their existence, based on the psychology of men," Gilligan said