57 Courses

Popular adult education has a curious affinity for numbers. Charles William Eliot struck the public fancy with his "five-foot shelf," Emanuel Haldeman-Julius makes hay with "five-cent" pamphlets, many have sold "15 easy lessons." Since last March the newest of these enterprises, the National Educational Alliance, has been offering as a short cut to learning 57 courses at 1-c- a lesson. By last week it had a good round number to boast about --250,000 students.

National Educational Alliance is the idea of John J. Crawley, a Manhattan mail-order and subscription publisher. Observing that British bookstalls were selling H. G. Wells's Outline of History like hotcakes, in cheap, weekly, paper-covered installments. Mr. Crawley decided to put the world's knowledge between paper covers and sell it by mail order, saving busy students the trouble of going to a bookstand. He spent three years lining up bigwig educators to write the lessons for him. Then he was ready to send out a weekly periodical called The Popular Educator, each issue containing about 30 lessons in as many subjects, at 25-c- a copy. A subscriber starts with issue No. 1, gets a complete education in 52 issues. Some subjects, such as history, have a serial chapter in every issue, others, such as journalism, are disposed of in 13 lessons.

The 57 subjects range from accountancy to zoology. They are supposed to cover a high-school and college education. National Educational Alliance's catholic curriculum includes such subjects as art, archeology, biology, literature, writing, interior decorating, photography, psychology, languages, philosophy. There are no courses in handcrafts or trades, because the alliance believes enough schools and publications already teach these.

The lessons, two or three pages each, are written in simple, popular style. They are a shrewd mixture of interesting fact, mental games and useful information. But The Popular Educator is more than a game or pastime. On its faculty are Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago professors, such famed educators as Historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Astronomer George Clyde Fisher, Archeologist Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead, Historian Allan Nevins, Dramatist Walter Prichard Eaton, Philosopher Harry Allen Overstreet. Their students include college graduates as well as men and women who never went to high school. In its first six months, National Educational Alliance has made a small profit, but President Crawley does not expect it to be a gold mine. The editors of The Popular Educator say they will be satisfied if their papers teach people to think.

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