Schoolhouse on the Air

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 910, 1 March 1930, Page 18

Schoolhouse on the Air

An Experiment in Canada

the University of r VH|.' Alberta, announcing lecture ten of the course in MpgT&f'p),’// European history. One IpJbL moment please. Stand by, please, for Professor Brown.” And while Professor Brown adjusts his sheaf of papers on the stand before the mike, Jimmy Smith at Aklavik on the Arctic Ocean refuels the fire with whale oil or walrus tusks or whatever it is they use up there, whittles down the end of his pencil, lights a cigarette, settles hack on his seal-skins, props his notebook on his knee, wrinkles his brow, and is all set for another whack at the Duke of Alva and his Spanish minions. Or it may De Professor Jones on English literature, or Professor White on the cosine of theta. And it may be that you haven’t Jimmy of Aklavik in mind at all, but rather Edna Black in a little schoolhouse ten miles east of Rocky Mountain House. Edna is a school teacher, whose people, most likely, couldn’t afford to send her to high school any longer so she borrowed money and went tG normal school; then she started to teach to pay back the money she borrowed; and now she’s taking correspondence courses by air so that she can write off the subjects of first year university and check off another milestone on the way to her educational objective. Jimmy Smith at Aklavik and Edna Brown at Rocky Mountain House are types of the young people the University of Alberta is trying to help by its radio courses (writes Wilfred Lees in the Toronto “Star”). They cannot come to university, at least not. just yet, so reversing the proportion of Mohammed and the Mountain, the university goes to them.

Education by wireless —people said it would come. Prophets of ten years ago got up on their metaphorical soap boxes and ranted about “the democracy of the ail’, the air by which we shall all be made equal—seeds of knowledge broadcast into the atmosphere.” It has all come about so naturally, though. Back in 1908 a university was an expensive luxury to the handful of frontier settlements and small towns and cities that constituted the new province of Alberta. So it was decided that, like the new driving horse that has to be hitched to the plough as well as to the top-buggy, the university had to be a “general purpose” institution adapting itself not only to the students who wished to move fast with modern thought, but also to the men and women -who plodded along in the settlements with little intellectual stimulation. Among the first students to register at the new university was a stout, jolly person, by name A. E. Ottewell. He put himself through university by working in logging camps. His work was not. that of cutting down spruce. Ottewell built himself a canvas-cov-ered hut. In the hut he had tables and benches with rough pine tops and slab legs. He had also a shelf of books. In the evenings he held classes for lumbermen who wanted to increase their knowledge. On Sundays lie' talked to the men about literature, religion and philosophy. One night he had just rolled in and was opening a book to take his usual nightcap when a high-booted man strode in, sat down on a bench and leaned back against the shelf of books. “Hello,” said Ottewell. “Howdy.” Quiet. Ottewell didn’t say anything more because he had found it advisable to let his students come around to their own way of broaching a subject. Finally—“ Say, you got an education, ain’t you?” “Well, I’m trying to get one.”

“Yell? You know lots more thsis f me. anyways.” Quiet for a few minutes. Then —“Say, what’s this philosophy stuff you’re talking about? I like it but I don’t get it.” “You mean you want a definition of it?” Ottewell leaned over and blew ont the light. “Hey! What the . . .” “I'm explaining it to you,” -am* Ottewell's voice from a corner of th» black-dark room. “The room i, dark, as you see.” “I'll tell the world"—in the hushed voice of one entering the inner my*, teries. “Can you see the black cat th»t came in the door with yuo?” “How the blazes . . .?” “Get up and look for it.” The man was heard to move toward the door. “Well. I'll look for it. then,” said Ottewell, an'd he got up and began to move in starts about the black room, stumbling over benches and tables. “Hey! What are you doing?” cam# a frightened voice from the doorway. I “I’m after that black cat.” “You d-d-ding fool; there’s no cat here.” “I know- there isn’t.” puffed Ottewell. “That’s philosophy—chasing a black cat in a dark room when there'* no cat there.” “You’re goofy!” cried the man, and fled out of the hut. The next morning before work he came back and stood in the door with a shamefaced grin on his face. “I get you,” he said. The story of Ottewell’s dramatisation of the old definition of philosophy shows, I think, something of the appeal he must have made to the people of Alberta, back settlements and cities, when, for thirteen or fourteen years, he took the university out beyond the walls. Simple answers to big questions seems to be the key to the university’s popularity. Big words are likely to get tangled up in the atmosphere. the director of the department .thinks. “Imagine,” he said, “ what ‘ autidisestablismentariinism’ would sound like if a couple of static squawks came in the middle of it." So when there is a current and general interest in a topic the professors of the university are inveigled into the studio to tell, simply and directly, the science, the history or the literature of it. For instance, when the evolutionists and anti-evolutionists were trading brick-bats a while back anybody in Alberta who was interested could have invited his friends in for the evening to hear the story of the ordering of the heavens, the structure of the earth, the unity of life, and the ideas about evolution from Thales to William Jennings Bryan. “It may be," the director . says, “that radio will prove the most effective medium through which to effer courses of instruction to those who are unable to attend a university. Our experiment will at least help us to evaluate education by radio. I think it was Gibbon who said that every person has two educations—one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself. To both of these educations poor and isolated students have a claim. We believe that, properly nandled, radio courses can be tremendously valuable in widening the field of university activity, in establishing contact between the university and the people, in changing the attitudes of the masses from one of indifferenc* and often antagonism toward the unb versity to one of affection and loyalty, and in meeting the increasing hunger for information that is one of the characteristics of young and growing communities.”