Education: How to Make People Read

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Stringfellow ("Winkle") Barr, president of St. John's College (100 classics), believes that anyone can understand a classic. Last spring he and Columbia Broadcasting System's Adult Education Board decided to try to explain the world's great books to the U. S. radio audience. In a program called Invitation to Learning, each week three literary critics held a half-hour ad lib discussion of a classic before a microphone. Among their topics: The U. S. Constitution, Plato's Republic, Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

Mr. Barr & colleagues combed a list of 300 critics, eventually chose as the program's regulars Princeton's Novelist-Poet Allen Tate, Columbia's Pulitzer Prize Poet Mark Van Doren, and Huntington Cairns, assistant general counsel of the U. S. Treasury. Chairman and star performer was Mr. Cairns, who in his spare time speaks 15 languages, reads omnivorously, likes to play the abstruse Japanese game Go.

Classicists Cairns, Tate and Van Doren earnestly tried to enliven their performance with modern applications of the classics. Quite without sparkle, their program plodded at a pedestrian classroom pace. Nonetheless, to the amazement of one & all, by last week it had attained an estimated audience of 1,000,000. Half a dozen publishers began to sell cheap editions of the classics hand over fist, 4,000 libraries found the books in such demand that they dug them out of dusty stacks, put them on special shelves.

Last week, chesty over its contribution to U. S. uplift, CBS launched Invitation to Learning as a regular program, scheduled a series of 26 broadcasts on Sunday afternoons, immediately following the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.