Former Yale President Benno C. Schmidt Jr. vigorously defended his profit-based Edison Project to a skeptical audience in a speech at the Harvard Graduate School of Education last night.

He said, only half-jokingly, that he left Yale to head the project because he "wanted to get involved with education."

The Edison Project is a privately-sponsored national initiative designed to foster innovative public schools without spending more money.

The project started because its leaders recognized the deterioration of American schools, Schmidt said.

Schmidt cited Chicago's public schools, where almost every other student fails to graduate from high school, as a prime example.

If Schmidt's ideal schools succeed, they could serve as models for restructuring education throughout the country, he said.

But many of the 400 audience members said they doubted the Edison Project could achieve its goals.

The Project's aims for participating schools--three of which will open in Massachusetts in 1995--include providing a computer in the home of every school-age child, lengthening the school day and mandating a 17-to-one pupil-teacher ratio.

But educators such as William G.W. Barnes, director of academic technology at the prestigious Connecticut prep school Choate Rosemary Hall, criticized the Edison Project for not dealing with more complex school problems such as teaching students who don't speak English.

Kathy Moss, a Boston public school teacher, said she felt that the Edison Project betrayed its own principles by stressing that few specialists would be employed, while using specialists to address many of its own internal concerns.

The question of whether a company should profit from public education was also hotly debated during the question and answer period of the forum.

"Profits are not a new phenomenon in American public schools," Schmidt said. Schmidt vehemently defended the project, stressing that market pressures such as accountability and responsiveness benefit an educational company and its clients.

The profits result from the company's low overhead and small bureaucracy, Schmidt said.

Because there would be fewer administrators, however, teachers in schools organized by the Edison Project may have much heavier workloads.

"I wouldn't teach there, but I would like to administer there," Moss said.