Education: Radio Colleges

Few people are so pathetically ignorant as your well-informed man. The radio has bred this form of mental contagion to an alarming extent in the rural districts. Tom, Tom, the farmer’s son, instead, of leading books on fertilizers, on grafting, on pheasant raising, as more sensible fellows may be doing, spends his evenings listening to talk about the condition of the soap and toothpaste industry, about stocks and bonds, about Florentine painting, about Peter Rabbit. To combat this absurdity the universities of Iowa, of Pittsburgh, and the Kansas State Agricultural College have seen fit to sow the wind with orderly knowledge, sending lectures through the air, giving college credits to those who can pass examinations on what they have heard. Last week these seats of airy learning announced their fall curricula.

In Iowa Professors broadcast from WSUI. An enrollment fee of $2 is charged, $4 thereafter per semester hour of final credit granted. Thus a radio student can take, for $60 or so, a course that would cost a college attendant from $200 to $600. Last spring one Clifford Liddeen, in absentia in Texas, received his degree. This fall the University offers courses in: Early Iowa History, American Literature, Iowa Flora, English, and Elementary Psychology.

In Pittsburgh Chancellor John G. Bowman led off last week with a talk on Spare Moments. Dr. A. G. Worthing explained the Nature of Electricity, or as much of it as he could. Lectures in the offing deal with Radium, X-rays, Structure of the Atom, Relativity—topics which will doubtless supply timely and needed information to the farmers.

In Kansas a rural school’s program, though less recondite, is perhaps not less valuable than the programs of Iowa, of Pittsburgh. It begins at nine o’clock in the morning with wake-up exercises, and follows them with a music lesson, nature study, travel, lives of great men, books to read, current events. Five minutes are allotted to an agricultural primer of poultry, crops, dairying, horticulture, live stock.