Education: Scholars & Teachers

Ever since 1933, when President Robert Maynard Hutchins, disturbed at the way teacher education seemed divorced from scholarly pursuits, abolished the school of education, the University of Chicago has been without an organized teacher-training program. In 1958 the university decided it was high time to get back in business again, and last week Francis S. Chase, dean of Chicago's new graduate department of education, announced the program for the first 100 students, due to enter next September. His prospectus makes plain that on its second try, Chicago is in dead earnest about producing teachers who know their specialties, scholars who know how to teach.

The key to the blend lies in the two-year mix of the program. In his first year, the student will spend a full year of graduate work in his subject under supervision of top scholars from various divisions of the university proper. Among the teachers: Historians Daniel Boorstin and Louis Gottschalk, Physicist Samuel Allison, Mathematician Marshall Stone. In addition, students will observe high school teaching, take a wide-ranging weekly seminar in the psychology of learning and the philosophy of education. In the student's second year, the emphasis shifts to a "teaching residency in a selected high school." Unlike unpaid practice teachers, the student will earn three-fifths of a regular teacher's salary. Once a week he will meet with a university scholar to go over problems in teaching his subject.

At the end of two years, to earn his master of arts in the teaching of his specialty, the student must be certified by three groups: his major department in the university, the education department, the supervisors of his year of teaching. The result, says Dean Chase, is that "we will be putting ourselves out on a limb. We will not only be saying that this person has passed our tests, but that he or she will be a good teacher."