The Harvard Touch

In the 1930s, Harvard's Graduate School of Education was so poor in pocket and prestige that President James B. Conant was tempted to padlock it. And then, characteristically. Conant thought of upgrading its mission instead. He devised the one-year Master of Arts in Teaching program, designed to turn graduates of liberal arts colleges into teacher-scholars rather than pedagogues.

Harvard's M.A.T. degree requires not only education courses, but also graduate learning in liberal arts and apprentice, or "intern," teaching in any of a dozen school systems around Boston. The idea reunited Harvard's once warring education professors and scholars of arts and sciences. Now they run the program together, with public schools happily joining in. The plan has spread to many other campuses, among them Yale, Chicago, Duke, Emory, Oberlin, Reed and Stanford. But it is still surging strongest at Harvard's famed and thriving education school :

> Applications have more than doubled in the past five years. Harvard now has 250 M.A.T. candidates.

> In Harvard's class of 1959. 56% of the M.A.T. candidates were honors graduates, v. 53% of prospective M.D.s.

> Of all M.A.T.-earners in the first dec ade after World War II, about 60% of the women and 82% of the men are still confirmed teachers. Most important. 80% of those still teaching are in public schools and public colleges.

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