Education: General Counsel

The U.S. Commissioner of Education has an unenviable sort of job. As a member of the Department of Health. Education and Welfare, he has a big title with comparatively little authority. He sponsors worthy projects and collects worthy statistics, but his main function is less to administer than to advise. Last week President Eisenhower nominated a man who should fill the post well: Lee M. Thurston of Michigan.

Genial Republican Thurston, 57, has left a trail of chalk dust behind him. A Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, he started out as a high-school science teacher in Manistee. worked his way up to be Michigan's superintendent of public instruction. A restless, bubbling executive, he ran his 8,000 schools and 42,000 teachers with amiable efficiency. But he was no ordinary bureaucrat: the best way to run a school, he insists, is to have an enlightened local citizenry do the job itself.

Lee Thurston has indicated that he will stick by his philosophy. The big task for the Office of Education, he says, is to "make far greater use, in a cooperative relationship, of the several state departments of education." As a sort of beneficent uncle and general counsel to U.S. education ($14,800 a year), Thurston will go right on doing what came naturally in Michigan: teaching Americans how they can get better schools themselves.