Mortimer Jerome Adler
~ Renaissance Man
Mortimer Jerome Adler (1902-): has been hailed as "a philosopher
for everyman" by Time.An American Scholar, philosopher, and prolific
author, born in New York City, and educated at Columbia University, where he
later taught.Professor at many universities, most notably at the University of
Chicago, where he co-developed "The Great Books Of The Western World"
seminars with U of C president Robert Hutchins.Developer of numerous
foundations and centers for lifelong learning.Author and editor of over 60
scholarly books.A strong advocate of all education (including continuing and
adult ed.), of obtaining a rigorous liberal arts foundation, of reforming
public education, and of sensible and critical thinking, reading, writing, and
speaking.Most of his efforts prompt adults to obtain a liberal education
through an understanding of great works of philosophy, literature, history,
science, and religion - all of which can be done without formal education.
In this brief paper, the author attempts to get
inside the head of this living academic giant and answer some questions the way
he might, if he were asked in person.The author makes no claims of authority or
authenticity on the views of Adler.The process is intended to illuminate some
of the more obvious positions of perennialism and classical humanism.Plato,
Rousseau, Piaget, and Houle (to name a few figures somewhat aligned with Adler)
form a core of thinkers who advocate a liberal arts education.
It would be easy, given his long-time
associations with formalized institutions of higher education, to assume Adler
advocates traditional formal (i.e., “public”) education as the way to
enlightenment.Adler, in the author’s view, seems more focused on self-directed,
lifelong learning than encouraging people to spend endless years in the ivory towers.In
recent years, he has helped establish a number of adult learning web sites
committed to helping people educate themselves worldwide.One site, for
example, is entitled The Great Books of Western Civilization Café.It
contains several of Adler’s academic works, links to Great Books, and advice
from Adler on how to participate in online seminars on the great ideas from the
Great Books.Adult discussion groups across the world chat at one another about
what they are learning through their study of the great works of the ages.Some
of the adult seminars provide a semi-formal structure, utilizing the Socratic
method of questioning, lectures with question and answer forums, and other
methods of guidance.However, students are always in control of their own learning
process.How much mentoring one chooses to receive is up to her or him.
Adler has
written extensively on his views and concerns regarding the purposes and
possibilities of education.We will ask him five general questions regarding his
views on each subject.First, what does “education” equal; in other words, why
do we educate?Second, what is the most effective pathway to literacy, and, why
do you think literacy is important?Third, who should participate in education,
and, do you see a group who should particularly be educated?Fourth, what is the
role of the teacher in the teaching/learning process?And, fifth, what would be
some practical advice you would give to someone who is new to this business of
educating adults?Besides direct Adler quotes, all below comments are of the
author’s imagination alone.
Your question is supremely one of deep philosophical content.It will require one to honestly seek for the truth, or the “philosophy” of education.The philosophy of education is a great place to begin.For “the philosophy of education is practical, not theoretic, precisely because it answers. . . [the] question: what men should do” (Adler, 1977, p.56).I can say, after 75 years in the business of education, that many in my field are not at all concerned with the search for absolutely true principles regarding what humans should do.And this has long been so.In 1941, I debated Bertrand Russell on the question, are there absolute and universal principles on which education should be founded.I was shocked and disappointed by Lord Russell.He “made no attempt to demonstrate the falsity of the conclusion I had tried to prove to be true.For the most part he was not even relevant to the issue.He made no effort to understand the issue” (p. 54).This is typical of thinkers who believe the answers to defining education are simply relative, and conformable to different situations.
In contrast, I believe “that the ends of education, the ends men should seek, are always and everywhere the same.They are absolute in the sense that they are not relative to time and place, to individual differences and the variety of cultures” (p. 57).This does not indicate that “the particular means are absolute.On the contrary, just because they are particular, they are relative and variable – relative to different cultures and different individuals, and hence variable according to the varying circumstances of the time and place at which the universal and absolute principles must be applied” (p. 58).
With those opening clarifications accomplished, I will now both define education and describe why we educate.Education equals the discovery of who we are and what we are to be about as human beings.It “is the process whereby a man helps himself or another to become what he can be . . . . the process wherebya man is changed for the better . . . to become a good man, which is something he can be, though perhaps not as readily as being a bad man” (p. 59).“The proximate ends of education are the moral and intellectual virtues. . . The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction” (p. 60).We educate because the full potential of human nature is not something we are born with.The potential exists for humans to develop into good or bad men, instruments of betterment or instruments of corruption.This is why “education must aim at the betterment of men by forming good habits in them, and if the virtues, or good habits, are the same for all men because their natural capacities are the same and tend naturally toward the same developments, then it follows that the virtues, or good habits, as the ends of education, are absolute and universal principles on which education should be founded” (p. 61).
Finally, I say that adult education is quite philosophical in nature.With Aristotle, I believe in this life we should seek a target, like an archer who has a mark to aim at.That target, at least for citizens willing to awake from their moral and intellectual slumber, is the seeking of “sound and practical answers to questions about the good life and good society.”This is why “philosophy is everybody’s business.”Adults who seek lifelong education, pursuing the ends I have outlined above, are utilizing “philosophy’s ability to answer the most basic normative questions, what ought we seek in life? and how ought we seek it?” (Adler, 1999, online).
What is the most effective
pathway to literacy, and, why do you think literacy is important?
Children are
taught the basics of reading their mother tongue fairly well for the first four
or five years of their primary schooling. The continuing block in the
pathway to solid literacy is in the failure of schools to “carry instruction in
reading beyond the elementary level.Most of our educational ingenuity, money,
and effort is spent on reading instructions in the first six grades.Beyond
that, little formal training is provided to carry students to higher and quite
distinct levels of skill” (Adler, 1972, p. x).This is quite unfortunate, for
true literacy is not a simple nor easy task.Children should be taught the
intricacies of reading through high school and on into college.Literacy is so
very important because it aids in the development of“an educated people – a
citizenry or electorate capable of exercising a free and critical judgementon
public issues and on the performance of public officialsand a society of
cultivated human beings” (Adler, 1977, p. 126).Literacy is not the only way to
develop the virtues and become a good man, but it is one of the most powerful
ways to fully participate as a contributor of the betterment ofsociety;
something I have already established as one of the main aims of education in
question one above.
In our culture, this is the most self-evident question you have asked so far.My friend, John Dewey, who I studied with back at the University of Chicago, was the first person in history to put together the words democracy and education.He wrote a book about the subject, in fact.I agree with him that “in our kind of society, all the children who go to school are destined to have the same kind of future; therefore, the objectives of schooling should be the same for all.They should all have exactly the same quality of schooling” (Adler, 1977, p. 278-279).
In 1982, after
considerable study and debate, I wrote The Paideia Proposal.It
was my first stab at what I called an Educational Manifesto.In
that piece of work I outlined a lifetime’s worth of views on how we can improve
education for all people.“Paideia is the Greek word for general
human learning; the Latin of paideia is humanitas” (p. 279).The idea
behind this concept is that there is a body of knowledge that all of humanity
deserves to possess.Every child in America should be able to participate in top
quality education.Unfortunately, in America, the “quality of schooling has been
declining for the last sixty years.We must start climbing back” (p. 279).This
country has not taken seriously enough its claim to democracy.Education has
only recently been strongly impacted by democracy.Historically, it was “an
antidemocratic, or undemocratic, system of education, a holdover from the
nineteenth century and the first years of this century.We have a two-track
educational system.We separate the children into the sheep and the goats, and
we do not give them the same quality of schooling.It is about time – now that
democracy is just beginning to come into existence – that we try to create,
over the next hundred years, a system of schooling that fits a democratic
society” (p. 281).My Paideia Proposal is an appeal for the improvement of
education for all students, not just an elite few.Read it and you will
see.
That depends upon the particular setting of learning.There are at least two distinct processes of learning:learning by instruction, which I call aided discovery, and learning by discovery, which I call unaided discovery (Adler, 1972).
In aided discovery, there is a teacher present in the learning process.This teacher may be alive and present with the learner, or present only in the form of her/his writing (i.e., the books which contain her/his ideas, whether s/he is alive or dead).Either way, the learner is influenced by an instructor, the one who wrote the material, or the one who attempts to illuminate the material.In this form of teaching/learning, it is very important for the teacher to remember that teaching is much like farming and doctoring.“A doctor may do many things for his patient, but in the final analysis it is the patient himself who must get well – grow in health.The farmer does many things for his plants or animal, but in the final analysis it is they that must grow in size and excellence.Similarly, although the teacher may help his student in many ways, it is the student himself who must do the learning.Knowledge must grow in his mind if learning is to take place” (pp. 12-13).
In unaided discovery, the teacher has no role whatsoever.The learner undertakes her/his own process, whereby “the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse” (p. 13).In theory, humans do not need teachers at all.They could just as well discover all they need to know on their own.However, years of training in public education have impaired most human beings’ innate ability to discover on their own.Still, it is possible for learners to learn first by discovery everything learned later with the aid of instructors.
Few humans, in
reality, can learn all they need to know without some instruction.Search for
instructors who do not simply attempt to communicate what they know.This is
counterfeit teaching, and seldom will result in true learning. “Successful
teaching occurs only when the mind of the learner passes from a state of
ignorance or error to a state of knowledge. . . . the transformation effected
in the mind of the learner is learning by instruction only if another human
being has taken certain deliberate steps to bring about that
transformation.What the teacher does must be deliberately calculated to change
the mind of the learner.Merely motivating someone to learn is not enough;
stimulation is not teaching” (Adler, 1977, p. 168).If you choose to be
instructed, search for instructors who will do just that, instruct.They will be
helpers in the process of your learning, not transmitters of knowledge.However,
be prepared for a true instructor to influence you.That is her/his role, if,
indeed, you desire instruction.
The first thing adult educators must understand is that most adults have been improperly educated for most of their lives.They have been taught specializations rather than generalizations for so long that they have no real ability to understand the world around them as an interconnected whole.Their knowledge is thin and truncated by schooling intent to prepare them only for productivity in the vocation of their life, rather than preparing them to think deeply and philosophically in order to reason for themselves in every situation that life presents them.
On the dedication page of one of my later books, I give appreciation to Jose Ortega y Gasset, “whose understanding of the humanities as the cure for the barbarism of specialization inspired the establishment of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies” (Adler, 1986).I wrote this book with hopes that readers would gain much needed “philosophical insight and distinctions that enable us to lay out the geography, as it were, of the realm of learning.”In it, I survey “the literature from antiquity to the present day” – in order to help readers follow the admonishment of Aristotle, who made the following statement:‘It is necessary to call into council the views of our predecessors in order that we may profit by whatever is sound in their views and avoid their errors’” (pp. vii-viii).I am attempting “to provide something like a chart or map for the journey that everyone should undertake with the hope of finally reaching the understanding and wisdom that is the beckoning goal and the culmination of the effort.”We live in an age exploding with information, but “we are suffering from what Jose Ortega y Gasset has called ‘the barbarism of specialization’ which dismisses a generalist approach to the world of learning as amateurism” (p. 3).
The challenge with adult learners, as I see it, is that as relatively young human beings they were deeply affected by specialization.They were allowed to elect too many of their liberal arts courses.Impacted by a culture bent on producing workers only (rather than thinkers) students have a tendency to “choose lines of specialization that promise immediate rewards in the marketplace.”This has “resulted in the neglect of studies essential to the general cultivation of the mind” (p. 2).
I believe young students (not necessarily young in age, but new to the process of seeking true knowledge and wisdom) would do much better to learn in schooling “that is general rather than specialized, liberal rather than vocational, and humanistic rather than technical” (p. 2).Upon this foundation, learners can embark upon a lifelong process of educating themselves.For, “no young person can complete his or her education in school, college, or university for the simple reason that youth itself – immaturity – isand insuperable obstacle to becoming a truly educated human being while still young.
“One’s education can be begun in institutions but it can never be completed there.Only a truly mature or adult person can possibly attain the kind of education that produces generally cultivated human beings, men and women who feel at home in the whole world of human knowledge, who know their way around in it, and have the kind of understanding of basic ideas, issues, and value, together with some modicum of wisdom, that everyone should aspire to possess” (pp. 2-3).
All the above being said, it follows that one of your primary tasks in educating adults will likely be helping them to buy into the need to pursue a much broader self-education.Today’s formal schooling teaches our citizens to learn an inch wide and a mile deep.This creates a society of barbarism, a group of people devoid of connection with the wisdom of the ages.Help your adult students to strive for learning that is several inches deep and a mile wide.This creates a society of well-rounded, culturally literate citizens, wholly capable of thinking and acting on their own.A culture built upon these types of wise citizens would indeed be the great culture that centuries of philosophers and academicians have dreamed of.