INVITATION TO LEARNING

In 1940, a new invitation to learning was on the air. Dr. Stringfellow Barr, president of St. John’s College at Annapolis, extended the bid to those who would listen to learn Sunday afternoons. Pointing out that for more than 2,000 years Western civilization had drawn sustenance from liberal education, he took to the wave lengths on a coast-to-coast network of more than eighty stations. By exploring classic literature, which gave “culural background to the nation’s founders,” as Dr. Barr explained, he aimed to strike a new keynote in liberal education through the medium of radio. In its twenty-four-year span of existence, Invitation to Learning had acquired a variety of descriptive epithets. M. Lincoln Schuster, lively and peripatetic president of Simon & Schuster, called the CBS program “CQ – Civilization Quotient.”  Rival broadcasters once good-naturedly labeled it “Columbia’s Hour of Silence.” An irritated savant charged it with being “Imitation to Learning.” A radio columnist d