How to Find It

The announcement had the ring of a radio commercial. After completing the new courses, students would be able to "inquire like scientists, reason like philosophers, explain like historians, or imagine like poets and artists." Even if they had never been to college before, they could also sport a new degree--Ph.A., Associate of Philosophy.

The ring was truer than it sounded. Last week, when Cleveland College, the downtown division of Western Reserve University, announced its Basic Arts program, 100 Ohioans from Ph.D.'s to adults who had never finished the seventh grade said they wanted to sign up. The program was the invention of the college's new dean of the School of General Studies, John P. Harden, who once directed the University of Chicago's Great Books program.

The Arts v. Facts. In Barden's book, the Basic Arts are listening, reading, talking, observing, writing, doing, and making. Students who take any or all of the six seminars in the Basic Arts won't be confronted with masses of fact. Instead students, if they are successful, will learn "how knowledge is acquired and how works of art are created." In the science seminar, for instance, they will study what great philosophers have written about scientific methods (Bacon's aphorisms, Descartes' Discourse on Method, etc.), repeat some of the great laboratory experiments.

History students will study the methods of the historians from Thucydides to Tawney and Toynbee. Then they will study the raw material that a modern historian might have to use--statistics, opinion polls, propaganda, debates on the floor of Congress--to see what they can make of them.

Methods v. Memory. "The theory," says Barden, "is that if you know the methods employed in any intellectual field, you are prepared to figure the rest out for yourself." Barden thinks that any man or woman with a Ph.A. (a degree ranking somewhere below a B.A.*) should be able to enter almost any college as a junior, though the real purpose of the program is to set adults on the way to their own self-education.

John Barden has no idea how well the Basic Arts seminars will work out, but he is somewhat skeptical. Says he: "Their newness will be a challenge. Later, the teaching will become uninspired. Then the professors will have to start something different."

* Other sub-B.A. degrees in the U.S.: A.A. (Associate of Arts), Adj.A. (Adjacent in Arts).

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