In whatever way some future historian of Harvard characterizes this year at the Graduate School of Education, he will certainly have to say that is was a year in which the students were heard.

They churned out newsletters and created committees, circulated questionnaires and issued reports, bending the collective ear of the faculty and administration in every way they knew. As a result, they have won the right to consult and participate in the decision-making processes of the Ed School, have begun a systematic evaluation of Ed School courses and procedures, and have taken on the task of criticizing and analyzing the Scheffler Report--a faculty plan for major reform at the Ed School.

And though the attention they have received this year belies it, making themselves heard is not new to Ed School students, for they have a long history of poking around in their own shop.

The fact that Ed School students are always had so much to say about what is happening to them arises in part from the kinds of people who suppose the HGSE student body. Some are flip about education, and some are very serious, but practically all of them come to the gradual or sudden awareness that the profession they have chosen involves a frighteningly total commitment. Many have traveled the Peace Corps route, or have worked in undergraduate projects in city slums, or in civil rights organizations. Many have already taught, and have faced resistance to new ideas from unimaginative colleagues and administrators in apathetic communities with under-achieving students. The single attribute common to the students in the Ed School, however, is that most of them have seen enough of the real world to know that they want to change it.

Ed School students accept the fact that HGSE is really not interested in being the purveyor of teachers to the nation. They know that the School may supply teachers--by coincidence--but that it clearly concentrates its energies on preparing its students to achieve positions of leadership in teaching, administration, and scholarship.

Some think this vision of purpose is insidious, while others consider it noble, or maybe Machiavellian, or perhaps altruistic, or impossible, or sensible. It may be all these things or none of them, but whatever it is, it seems to have worked well--so well, in fact, that when one thinks of graduate schools of education, Harvard's is usually the first to come to mind.

And so, Ed School students view Harvard as the place where they can get their hands on the levers that will move education. But when the school has not lived up to their expectations, they have seldom hesitated to make themselves heard, when and where it counts.

There is a certain volume and urgency, though, that characterizes the student voice this year, qualities which differentiate it from student voices of the past.

One reason for this is that the Ed School is experiencing a period of rapid growth. Its students now number over 800 and come from nearly 100 colleges in all sections of this country and 14 foreign nations. They come too, with backgrounds in law, business administration, theology, and journalism, as well as all of the liberal arts disciplines. The faculty has grown accordingly. It has over 175 members now, with almost half of the senior faculty having been named within the last two years, and represents an unusual admixture of humanists, sociologists, scientists, historians, psychologists and the like.

Conequently it has become increasingly difficult for the faculty and students to feel that they are part of the entire enterprise of the School. Many have found it difficult to keep informed of what is going on, not only in the whole School, but in their own programs as well. Even the School's informal afternoon teas now draw about 200 students and faculty members each day to the plush Eliot-Lyman Room, and have grown from quiet gatherings with important topics of conversation to something resembling a theatre intermission. A sense of isolation exists, and it has been felt by faculty and students alike, but it has been the students who feel they have suffered most, and who, in a sense, think of themselves as the forgotten people.

Some of the urgency and volume of the student voice is a result of the Scheffler Report, which after exploring and rejecting the notions that the School's functions be farmed out to the other departments in the University, that it train only academicians, that it became a research institute with no students, or that it train only teachers, decided that the special challenge of the Graduate School of Education is to "identify and feed into the center of the University the live problems of school and community, and concurrently, to concentrate all relevant energies of the University upon the educational enterprise."

Specifically, the report proposed the allocation of a greater portion of the resources of the School to doctoral

(Andre Favat is a Teaching Fellow in Gen Ed A. and serves as President of the Student Association of the Graduate School of Education, where he is an Ed.D. candidate in English, and a supervisor in the MAT program.) sudy, the lengthening of the MAT program to "one year plus," and the establishing of a new, required, full year courses for all master's candidates which would replace all or parts of a number of existing introductory courses.

The Report also re-organized the faculty into three disciplinary areas: humanities, social sciences, and psychology, and three clinical areas: administration, guidance, and teaching, thereby reaffirming the School's intent to balance research and practice. Proposed. too, was a school-wide coloquum for doctoral students.

But many of the School's students bristled at the generality of even the most concrete proposals, and faculty reassurances notwithstanding, they feared that the implementation of the proposals would vitiate the new things, and merely slap a new coat of paint on the old. While there was still time, many of them thought, student action might be able to affect faculty deliberations.