Progress's Pilgrim

Sarah Lawrence College was released three years ago from the protective custody of Vassar's President Henry Noble McCracken (TIME, Dec. 21, 1936), its eight-year-old feet set firmly on the path of progressive education. Ever since then, the college has wanted to record in film a "sustained visual explanation" of itself. Last week the wish was fact.

Shown for the first time to the student body, Design for Education chronicles the Sarah Lawrence educational method typified in the four-year career of a candidate for an A.B. degree. "Joan," the heroine, is Marjory Erdman, a sophomore from Honolulu, who was allowed to count her cinemacting as school work. From the time she comes wide-eyed up the winding drive to the luxurious hilltop estate of the late founder William Van Duzer Lawrence in Bronxville, N. Y., until she self-consciously reads her senior "contract" (thesis) to critical classmates, Joan untiringly shows off Sarah Lawrence's progressivism.

As a freshman she pulls on her sweater, rolls up her sleeves, and plunges in to college professors whenever she feels the need of tutelage (there are discussion groups, no lectures, no textbooks). Steadily, humorlessly, the film photographs Joan under the watchful eye of her adviser, or "Don"; Joan on her self-chosen "project"; Joan earnestly typing in a barebacked bathing suit while her friends loll, sunbathe; Joan aiming a camera at two naked tots at the nursery school provided by Sarah Lawrence for students of Child Psychology, Personality Development, and The Family. Like Joan, other student actresses find their texts outside of books, in skeletons, housing projects, surgical operations. But the film skip's something that Sarah Lawrence girls spotted right off with a long, loud hoot: Joan never plays.

Residence and tuition charges amounting to $1,700 a year might be a good reason for Joan's attention to business, but most of the girls are well-off, although there are 33 scholarships, ranging from $100 to $1,000. Generally the girls can afford to be sloppy in sweater & skirt, rumpled polo coat and smudged saddle shoes, as Joan is, but they can also afford expensive outfits. Sarah Lawrence has climbed high in women's education, has earned the reputation of being among the best of women's progressive colleges.* It also has the reputation, which the faculty deprecates, of being a finishing school for the rich and fashionable.

* Other progressive girls' college: Bennington.

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