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What
Happened to the Great Ideas?
By
John Berlau
jberlau@InsightMag.com
Philosopher
Mortimer J. Adler recently passed away,
but his legacy lives on in the Great Books programs
he inspired and succeeded in establishing across
the nation.
Mortimer J. Adler died
in late June at the age of 98. Born in 1902,
he was a philosopher and educator who
lived through almost every year of the 20th
century. But he was not a man of that century,
at least not in establishment academic circles.
From the 1920s until his death, Adler most often
was a voice in the wilderness crying out against
educational trends he saw as destructive. He
fought progressive education's child-centered
academic curriculum and vocation-centered training.
Instead he championed general education in the
classics.
At a time when moral relativism has become
dominant, Adler proclaimed that there still
were universal moral truths to be found in the
works of Plato
and Aristotle.
Academics heaped scorn on him for writing
about philosophy in simple terms for the masses
in books with titles such as Ten Philosophical
Mistakes and Six Great Ideas and
Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought
Made Easy. He would maintain throughout
his life that philosophy is everybody's business.
Adler was dubbed the Lawrence Welk of the philosophy
trade by one critic. Dwight MacDonald of the
New Yorker derisively referred to Adler's work
as The Handy Key to Kulture. In the 1990s,
when Adler and his colleagues released a revised
edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great
Books of the Western World,
he was attacked viciously because the
series contained few works by women and none
from blacks. Harvard University's Henry Louis
Gates blasted the Great Books for showing profound
disrespect for the intellectual capacities of
people of color red, brown or yellow.
Adler calmly explained that the authors were
chosen not because they were dead white males
but because their work had stood the test of
time. He noted that the guidebook for the series
recommended many good books by blacks and women,
as well as works by white male authors that
didn't make the cut. But a Great
Book must be relevant to human problems in every
century, not just germane to current 20th century
problems, Adler wrote. The educational
purpose of the Great Books is not to study Western
civilization, Adler explained in the 1970s.
Its aim is not to acquire knowledge of
historical facts. It is rather to understand
the great ideas.
Even in death, Adler still may be an outcast
in academia, but he inspired legions of followers
who have formed colleges, homeschooling cooperatives
and Great Books discussion groups in major cities
based on his ideas about education. And although
his political positions often were of the left
he once advocated socialism and world government
some of his biggest champions today come from
the political right.
The Great Books are alive and well as a powerful
approach to education, Stephen Balch, president
of the conservative National Association of
Scholars, a group that pushes for a core curriculum
of Western classics, tells Insight.
It's alive and well in large part because of
his efforts as the architect of this kind of
grand design for education. Those who favor
an education in the service of civilization
are in his debt for all the work he did over
the years to establish the Great Books model
and to bring the Great Books to the American
population generally, not just those at
colleges and universities. He certainly
wanted as many people to read the Great Books
as possible, based on a belief that they
did speak to everybody.
Longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly
credits Adler with championing an education
in Western classics to everyone, against the
progressive educators who thought the classics
were irrelevant to many students. Progressive
educator John Dewey didn't believe in individuals
excelling in knowledge, Schlafly tells Insight.
He believed that the purpose of education was
to socialize people and have them do what
they re told, and Adler was a good counterbalance
to that.
In the early 1980s, Adler and his colleagues
set forth a detailed program of primary schooling
called Paideia, which is the Greek word
for the upbringing of children. In his book
The Paideia Proposal, Adler proposed
that the education for all children must
be general and liberal and nonspecialized
and nonvocational, no matter the perceived intellectual
capacity of the child. Using milk containers
as an analogy, he said the half-pint container
as well as the gallon container should be filled
to the brim with the same quality of substance
cream of the highest attainable quality for
all, not skimmed milk for some and cream for
others. Adler also emphasized that as
much as possible the great works should be taught
in the Socratic method , in which children
discuss what they have read, rather than as
a top-down lecture.
Today, the Paideia Group Inc. consults
with schools wanting to set up programs. Adler,
who was honorary chairman, sometimes would go
in and lead the children of participating schools
in discussions. I have such wonderful
letters from students who have been in the seminars
thanking Mortimer for what it has done for their
lives, Paideia Group President Patricia Weiss
tells Insight.
The Paideia Group concentrates on public schools,
Weiss says, because Adler was such a strong
advocate of universal public education. Still,
she says, public schools often are resistant
to change. She hopes that charter schools will
give teachers and parents more flexibility to
implement Paideia.
Meanwhile, the Great Books curriculum really
is taking off in homeschooling. Patrick
Carmack, who homeschools his children in Oklahoma,
cofounded the Great Books Academy
after reading Adler's books on education in
1999. The program assigns Great Books
for participating children to read and holds
online Socratic discussion groups in the style
that Adler proposed. The directors met with
Adler in 2000, and his longtime colleague Max
Weismann serves as chairman. Carmack says the
curriculum is being used by parents in every
state and internationally, and he expects
4,000 homeschoolers to be enrolled in
the next two years.
The Angelicum Academy puts forth a similar
Great Books homeschooling program but with more
emphasis on Catholic works.
At the college level, St. John's College
offers a four-year nonelective Great Books
program that Adler helped design in the 1930s.
The college, which has campuses in Annapolis,
Md., and Santa Fe, N.M., uses no textbooks,
at Adler's prompting. The only texts are the
primary materials that students read and discuss.
Textbooks merely are catalogs of
information that essentially are undiscussable,
Adler wrote.
At Wright College, a community college
in Chicago, Bruce Gans started a Great
Books elective course in which one-fifth of
the student body now has enrolled. Gans faced
objections from other faculty that works by
dead white males wouldn't go over well with
their mostly black and Hispanic students
going to school while working. But he tells
Insight that every year he gets letters and
notes on the final exams from such students
saying how much reading the great works has
bettered their lives.
Adler maintained that schooling did not
make one educated; it merely prepared students
for a life of learning. No one can be
an educated person, while immature, Adler
wrote in The Paideia Proposal. Only through
the trials of adult life, only with the
range and depth of experience that makes for
maturity, can human beings become educated persons.
Adler himself knew the value of self-education.
Hoping to be a journalist, he dropped out of
school at 14 to become a copyboy at the New
York Sun. After a year, he took night classes
at Columbia University to improve his
writing. Reading the autobiography of English
philosopher John Stuart Mill for a class, he
discovered that Mill had read Plato at age
5 . He felt a sense of shame that
he had not yet done so and borrowed Plato's
works from a neighbor. Adler was hooked, and
he eventually got a scholarship to study philosophy
at Columbia.
Adler's experience in the working world
led him to propose a mandatory two-year hiatus
from all schooling after students graduated
from high school, although this was not
formally included in the Paideia plan. Only
after experience in life and work would students
really be eager to learn.
Young people certainly cannot become mature
as long as they remain in school; on the contrary,
they suffer from prolonged adolescence,
Adler wrote in his autobiography Philosopher
At Large. That is a pathological condition
which can be prevented only by getting the young
out of school as soon after the onset of puberty
as possible.
This way, Adler said, universities would be
populated with students who return to educational
institutions because they have a genuine desire
for further formal study, instead of students
who occupy space in our higher institutions
as the result of social pressures.
Regardless of whether a person went to college,
Adler maintained that lifelong learning
was essential for personal happiness. Adler
defined happiness as Aristotle did, not as instant
pleasures but the joy and satisfaction that
comes from living a virtuous life. He never
stopped learning and wrote more than 20 books
after he turned 70 . The loss of immediate
or short-term memory that inevitably accompanies
advancing years in no way diminishes the
power of creative, analytic and reflective thought,
Adler wrote in his second autobiography, A
Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, published
when he was 89.
Some say the
example of Adler's long life of learning may
itself be one of his most enduring legacies.
Half-jokingly, Balch says, Mortimer Adler
is a great advertisement about the longevity
you can attain reading Great Books.
You have so many of these big challenging books
to read that you ve got to live a long time
to do them justice.
Reprinted with permission
of Insight. Copyright 2001 News World
Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
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