A Highly Creditable Curriculum

By Richard Zoglin

Engrossing new public TV shows double as college courses

Going to school via television used to be typically a matter of waking up with the chickens for a session of Sunrise Semester. But the TV classroom has left the chickens--and the sunrise--far behind. This fall, housebound students can examine issues in constitutional law under the guidance of such authorities as retired Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and former President Gerald Ford. They can also study the workings of the human brain, thanks to a lavish $6 million series that for dramatic impact rivals anything on St. Elsewhere. Best of all, they can do it in prime time.

The credit for this TV-for-credit boomlet goes largely to the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1981 the Annenberg School established a fund of $150 million, to be parceled out by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting over a period of 15 years, for innovative programming that would bring college-level courses to the home viewer. The initial five series in the Annenberg/CPB Project are making their debuts this fall. The two most ambitious are The Constitution: That Delicate Balance, which returned last month for 13 episodes, following four pilot segments aired last year; and The Brain, which premiered last Wednesday (each can be seen on more than 260 PBS stations). The others: Congress: We the People, a 26-part examination of the nation's legislative process; The New Literacy: An Introduction to Computers; and The Write Bourse, which teaches basic writing skills. Another new PBS series, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, an impressively mounted survey of Jewish history with Abba Eban as host, is not related to the Annenberg/CPB Project, but is also designed as a college telecourse. Toother these shows form a video curriculum that is more varied, stimulating and accessible than anything yet seen on American TV.

More than 400 institutions in 40 states, ranging from small community colleges to large state universities, are offering at least one of the Annenberg-funded courses this fall. In order to get credit, students must read a textbook and study guide, prepared under Annenberg auspices, and pass a final examination. But in most cases they need never set foot on campus.

Obviously, video learnning lacks the advantages of live classroom give-and-take. But the professors are topflight, the courses of study use the latest research, and the schedules are rigorous. "You have to be a highly self-disciplined person to take a telecourse," asserts John Flanagan, associate dean for nontraditional studies at Eastern Kentucky University, which is offering two of the Annenberg courses for credit this fall. "They go on whether you can study or not, whether you're sick or out of town. They're relentless."

Even for nonstudents, The Brain is one of the sea-- son's most engrossing new series. The eight hour-long shows focus mainly on human case studies illustrating the brain's functions and dysfunctions. In one episode, Choreographer Agnes DeMille is shown learning to use her body again after a near fatal brain hemorrhage. Another, called "Rhythms and Drives," introduces a Virginia woman who plunges into a crippling depression every winter. For months, she tearfully relates, her time is spent "sleeping, eating, crying." Her disorder is apparently an exaggerated version of the brain's natural response to seasonal variations in sunlight. The treatment: placing her for two hours each day in front of a bank of fluorescent lights, which fool her brain's biological clock into thinking it is summer. The stories are sometimes uncomfortably graphic (a ten-year-old boy who suffers up to 60 epileptic seizures a day), but nearly always fascinating; The Brain is a distinguished addition to television's science library.

If The Constitution is a bit less satisfying, it is probably because pinpointing the limits of a First Amendment right is more difficult than pinpointing a chemical imbalance in the hypothalamus. Each episode of the series, created by former CBS News President Fred W. Friendly, brings on a panel of experts who enact roles in hypothetical cases dramatizing Executive privilege, freedom of the press, school prayer, the right to life and other constitutional issues. President Ford and advisers like retired General Brent Scowcroft argue that classified information on covert CIA activity in the mythical country of Sierra Madre must be kept secret from Congress and the public. Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker disagree. The debate is familiar, but it gains discipline and clarity from the astute questioning of Moderator Benno Schmidt, dean of the Columbia Law School. Unfortunately, the hour shows are frequently over before the surface has been more than scratched: too many celebrity experts to hear from. Still, The Constitution is grappling with some big issues in a lively and informative way.

A stream of educational shows will emerge from the Annenberg/CPB Project in the years to come. Others currently in the works include a nine-part series on the history of African peoples; an introductory physics course called The Mechanical Universe; and a survey of American art, created by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For advocates of TV learning their arrival is long overdue. Says Friendly: "This generation spends so much time watching television that not to use it as a teaching tool is like not using a book."

-By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York

With reporting by Peter Ainslie