Education: Deeper ... Deeper... Dee ...

Midday shoppers, clustered about the window of British Overseas Airways' office on Washington's Connecticut Avenue, could hardly tear themselves away. Behind the glass, in strapless bathing suit, black-eyed Mary Jane Hayes, Miss Washington of 1949, climbed into a bed. On her pillow was a small black earphone and the words that she heard as she pretended to sleep floated outside through amplifiers. "Bon soir ..." cooed the speaker. "Good night . . . Bon . . . good . . . le soir . . . the night . . ." As onlookers soon found out, Miss Washington was modeling the newest type of French lesson.

It was not just a publicity stunt for BOAC. Washington's Educational Services, a serious-minded outfit dedicated to the proposition of "Recordings for more effective learning," had arranged the show to promote the latest wrinkle in learning-while-sleeping devices. Educational Services is planning to put out a tape-recording kit with instructions for learning anything from good behavior (for children) to old Danish.

Each kit will contain a "Prelude" for lesson-takers about to retire ("You are going to sleep now. It is getting deeper and deeper and deeper and dee . . ."). Next morning a "Postlude" will explain that in order to make the lesson stick, pupils should read it over quickly in the accompanying printed text.

Will this sort of instruction really work? Some educators have taken it seriously enough to give it a try. The Institute of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University is considering using it in an extracurricular course. The Institute of Logopedics in Wichita, Kans. is experimenting to see if it will help cure speech defects. For two years, Charles R. Elliott, psychologist at the University of North Carolina, ran tests with another pillow-mike apparatus which its inventor, bubbly little President Max Sherover of the Linguaphone Institute, calls a "cerebrograph." Psychologist Elliott found that a student who has been subjected to the cerebrograph can memorize a list of words (boy, egg, art, say, run, not, sir ...) faster than one who hasn't.

The theory is that when a person sleeps, his subconscious is still open to suggestion and can therefore learn. To prove it, sleep-learning promoters, including Inventor Sherover, have been out collecting endorsements. Alexander (Victory Through Air Power) de Seversky declares that a sleep machine helped cure his Russian accent. Rudy Vallee is using one to learn lines and lyrics. One housewife solemnly reported that, by placing a machine under her husband's pillow, she had taught him to like salad.