Handy Guide for The Autodidact

How to hit the books at home

Ever regret passing up that course in anthropology or art history? College on Your Own (Bantam; $6.95), a new 417-page anthology of college reading lists, offers a second chance to set out on all those roads not taken, in or out of college. Compiled by Gail Thain Parker, former president of Bennington College, and veteran Guidebook Author Gene R. Hawes, the book is an intellectual Whitman's Sampler. The reading lists have been approved by some 20 professors at leading colleges. Their fields range from such traditional disciplines as art history, English literature and mathematics to such newer areas as film, black American history and women's studies. Sample topics: Oceanic art, the Gilded Age, psychosis.

The book can be used for profit as well as pastime. For people who need a degree for job advancement, College on Your Own advises how to use the 1,700 or so colleges and universities (including Cornell and West Point) that grant credit for independent study. Most credits are based on test scores from the College-Level Examination Program (C.L.E.P.), and the authors believe that the reading lists in College on Your Own provide a good preparation. Says Parker, who taught history and literature at Harvard before she became an administrator: "We must not be misled by snobbery into thinking that there is only one way to become educated.''

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