AS he started to paint this week's cover portrait of Sargent Shriver, chief of the anti-poverty campaign, Artist Ben Shahn recollected his own fairly close acquaintance with the condition of the poor. "I grew up with it," he says, "and then had another dose during the Depression."

Lithuania-born, Brooklyn-bred, the young immigrant was raised in a Williamsburg slum. Later Shahn attended art schools in the U.S. and Europe, and over the years evolved his own distinctive style, winning fame as a painter of biting social comment, somewhere between caricature and fantasy. His work has taken many forms. During World War II, he drew posters for the U.S. Office of War Information. He has also done murals and stage sets. In 1956-57, exercising a kind of poetic license, he lectured on art as Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard. Many of Ben Shahn's pictures hang in major museums in the U.S. and abroad.

His portrait of Shriver, his seventh TIME cover, is a good example of the qualities for which Shahn is noted: a sureness of line and tone, meticulous attention to detail, but not exactly a passion for photographic likeness. Shahn catches Shriver in a mood at once pensive and bemused, an intent man beset with a maze of problems. "His intention is good," Shahn says of him, "but he can't do it alone."

NOW that this school year is waning, Time's Education Department* is preparing teaching aids for the next. They will go in the fall to 5,000 high school and college teachers in the U.S. and Canada enrolled in the Time Education Program.

The program offers not only TIME at special school-subscription rates, as a "textbook" on contemporary affairs, but also free monthly classroom materials in the form of guides, vocabulary tests, wall maps, charts, graphs and the annual Current Affairs Test. Projected for 1966-67 are introductions to the Supreme Court, religions of the world, Red China, international alliances, Canada, and space. There will also be two news brush-up quizzes. We hope that these teaching aids, like TIME itself, help the student develop a sharper perception of his world.

For more details about the program, you may write to Time Education Department, Radio City P.O. Box 666, New York, N.Y.

*A service department distinct from TIME'S Education section.

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