Keeping Awake

Eighteen of the nation's 25 educational TV stations became a network this week to promote their most ambitious experiment: five weekly series--in literature, geography, mathematics, government and music--created and broadcast live from Manhattan by NBC. The cost of $600,000 will be shared equally by NBC and Michigan's Ann Arbor Educational TV and Radio Center. Some of the projected shows, to be seen on weekdays from 6:30 to 7 p.m. for 13 weeks, sound tempting enough to lure plenty of viewers from commercial channels. Items:

P: The American Scene will present contemporary U.S. authors, e.g., Walter Edmonds, John Dos Passos, and readings from their works by such performers as Julie Harris, Ed Begley and James Daly.

P: Highlights of Opera History will open by examining the differences between opera and drama, with the help of actors and singers.

P: Mathematics will feature talks by such scholars as Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer on subjects ranging from puzzles and paradoxes to the relationship of mathematics to art, music and heredity.

In Manhattan itself, which has no educational TV station, NBC's key station WRCA will broadcast kinescopes of the series during slack hours on Saturdays and Sundays. But millions of U.S. viewers are out of range of the educational stations--they will get no benefit from the NBC project, and will have to take hope for the future in the high intentions voiced by commercial broadcasters fortnight ago at a Boston conference on public-service programing, hosted by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. Many would agree with Guest Speaker Charles (Twenty One) Van Doren, who told the conference: "You can have faith in an audience. I have heard from so many people who say, 'Please, let's have something that stretches us a bit; let's have something that makes us wake up and even keeps us awake, because television so many times is a kind of soporific--we use it to go to sleep. Please,' they say, 'teach us; we want to know things.' "

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