Education: NoTime for Infants

In 1920, just as an irate printer was about to destroy the plates for nonpayment of a bill, Sears, Roebuck & Co. stepped in and bought the bankrupt Encyclopaedia Britannica* Three years ago Sears decided that the publication of an encyclopedia was “foreign” to its merchandising business, made an outright gift of the venture to the University of Chicago. Last week Chicago’s Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins decided that it was time to make better use of Britannica and its film and publishing subsidiaries in his favorite crusade: adult education. He turned over the university to President Ernest C. Colwell for nine months, and moved to the Loop to work full time at Britannica.

Explained earnest Bob Hutchins: “We have been saying for years that the way to improve society is to educate the people, but we have limited education to infants between the ages of six and 21. . . . The world may not last long enough for the restricted campus education of today to affect the course of events. If there is a choice to be made between youth and adult education, then the urgency of our time gives priority to the adult.”

Hutchins, who already holds four jobs in the Britannica hierarchy, will add a fifth: chairman of the board of editors. He plans to concentrate on two projects: 1) hopping up Britannica’s 24 films a year (most of which strike him as “too timid, too unimaginative”), thereby leading the way in an “enormous development” of educational films aimed at new, cheaper projectors; 2) editing a 63-volume, “popular-priced” ($200-$250) set of “the great books of the western world,” first one-package edition of the “100 Books,” many of which are out of print.

The new Great Books set will include introductory essays by Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Carl Van Doren, Stringfellow Barr, plus a cross-index of the world’s great ideas and idea-men. An entire building on the Chicago campus is filled with ripe scholars and raw materials for this index. Publication date: 1948. For the first few years Britannica expects an annual sale of 5,000 sets.

* The world’s oldest continuing publication, founded in 1768 in Edinburgh by “a society of gentlemen”; first edited by one William Smellie, a tosspot crony of Robert Burns.