Mortimer+Adler+Biography

Type in the content of your page here.Mortimer Adler Personal Biography Mortimer Adler is an American professor, philosopher, and educational theorist. Born in 1902 in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry salesman, Adler dropped out of school at age 14 to become a copy boy for the New York Sun. He hoped to become a journalist, and decided a few years later to take some classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. While there he became interested in philosophy after reading the works of English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Upon learning that Mill had read Plato at age five, Adler decided to broaden his philosophical knowledge. He was so absorbed in his studies that he failed to fulfill the physical education requirement for graduation. However, Columbia soon awarded him an honorary doctorate because of the quality of his writings. Adler went on to become a psychology professor at Columbia, where he worked throughout the 1920s. As a professor at Columbia, he wrote numerous books about Western philosophy and religion, as well as his own works of philosophy. In his philosophical works, he avoided academic-sounding language in order to make his thoughts accessible to all readers. This practice is consistent with his belief that “philosophy is everybody’s business.“ He has written more than 50 books over the course of his life. In the 1930s Adler became a professor at the University of Chicago, where he advocated the adoption of the Classics as a main part of the curriculum. The faculty was reluctant to follow his ideas, and reassigned Adler to the Law School. In later years, Adler helped to found the Institute for Philosophical Research at the University of North Carolina, the Aspen Institute, and the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas. At his institutions, Adler focuses on making the study of Philosophy available to all people, not just specialists and the university-educated. At the Aspen Institute, for example, he teaches philosophy to business executives. He is currently a chairman of the Board of Editors at Encyclopedia Britannica and the director for the Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago, as well as a senior associate at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.

Philosophical/Educational School of Thought Mortimer Adler is Perennialist who believes that philosophy should become part of mainstream public school curriculum. He believes that education should be basically the same for everyone, because children’s “sameness as human beings...means that every child has all the distinguishing properties common to all members of the species.” (Paideia, p.43) In his Paideia Proposal, which sets out his vision for American public schools, Adler says that children must acquire three different types of knowledge: organized knowledge, intellectual skills, and understanding of ideas and values. For each of these types of knowledge, there is a different teaching style. Organized, or factual, knowledge is to be taught through lectures, intellectual skills are to be taught through coaching and supervised practice, and understanding of ideas and values are to be taught through the Socratic method of discussion and questioning. Adler believes in liberal, non-specialized education without electives or vocational classes. For him, education should serve three purposes: to teach people how to use their leisure time well, to teach people to earn their living ethically, and to teach people to be responsible citizens in a democracy. He believes that each person has the innate ability to do these three things, and that education should above all prepare people to become lifelong learners. Education never ends, in his view -- age 60 is the earliest that anyone can claim to be truly “educated”, and only then if they have devoted their life to learning. Philosophy and the arts are central to Adler’s educational vision. While he believes that every child should study math, science, history, geography, measurement, and other subjects in the lower grades, his plan for upper secondary school and college centers on students gaining insight into works of fiction, poetry, drama, art, and the like. This, way, Adler believes, students will gain an understanding of their own minds as well as the minds of others. Philosophy and art are for everyone, in his view. No one should be allowed to avoid them. College students, in Adler’s view, should be required to take a core of classes dealing with Western philosophy, politics, and religion. In short, everyone should be educated in the same way, towards an understanding of truth based on Western philosophy. Importance to Education

Although Mortimer Adler has written a plan for all public schools in the United States, his ideas have had the most impact at the college level. During the 1920s and 1930s, Adler’s belief in the importance of Classical education led a significant number of American colleges and universities to adopt “Great Books” programs -- cores of required classes that focus on key works of Western philosophy and literature. Columbia University, Adler’s alma mater, adopted a form of this program that endures today: all undergraduates are required to take one year-long class in “Masterpieces of Western Literature” and one more year-long class in “Masterpieces of Contemporary Civilization”. In addition, students must take one semester in “Masterpieces of Western Art” and one semester in “Masterpieces of Western Music”. Many other colleges use some form of the Great Books program, inspired by Adler‘s ideas. In primary and secondary education, Adler’s ideas about great books of Western Philosophy seem to have influenced the education of prior generations more than the education of today’s children. Any literature curriculum that involved reading great works of Western literature and/or philosophy can be said to be influenced somewhat by Adler’s type of ideas.

website: http://www2.selu.edu/Academics/Faculty/nadams/educ692/Adler.html

"Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.” -Mortimer Adler Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) Philosopher and Educator GSAS 1928 Faculty 1923–29 For much of the twentieth century, as an author, teacher, and editor, Adler propagated the Great Books of Western civilization as a moral and intellectual basis for a well-educated public. He wrote or edited more than fifty books, two of the most influential being //How to Read a Book// (1940) and //How to Think About War and Peace// (1944). In 1943, Adler conceived the idea of compiling the //Great Books of the Western World//, 54 volumes containing 443 works by 74 authors. He served as associate editor of the project, published in 1952 by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the University of Chicago. He also edited the two-volume //Syntopicon//, an index of the collection's main ideas.

Adler's Great Books passion was nurtured at Columbia. Deciding upon a career as a philosopher at age 17 after reading Plato's //Dialogues//, he attended Columbia College on scholarship, finishing the four-year program in three years, but not graduating because he refused to take the required swimming test. He then entered Columbia's graduate school, where his teaching duties over five years included co-teaching, with Mark Van Doren, a section of General Honors. This course, invented by John Erskine in 1921, was the forerunner of Literature Humanities in the undergraduate Core Curriculum. After earning his Ph.D. in psychology in 1928, he was invited to the University of Chicago by its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, to create a Great Books program there. Adler taught at Chicago for twenty years, and at the Aspen Institute and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. For his entire life, he remained active in what he called the great-books movement and in educational reform, and continued to lecture and write into his nineties.

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker (University of Chicago) made much the same point about the importance of early education when he noted the effect of the lack thereof in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution in the United States in which too many children are not learning the skills and adopting the habits and values that other children acquire. One result is increasing inequality. For example, prior to 1950 college graduates earned about 40 percent more than high school graduates, on the average. Today they earn 80 percent more. Thus education prior to college admittance age (roughly age 18) is increasingly important in our society.  When is it too late to make up for deficient early education? Becker says studies show that by age 16 government job-training programs for 16-year-olds do not succeed because they cannot overcome the failure to learn skills in the first 16 years. Dr. Adler noted that the responsibilities and financial pressures of college costs, adulthood and marriage effectively end the availability of sufficient leisure time necessary for general, liberal educational opportunities for most college-age students, in favor narrow specialized, vocational education.  Can government schools solve the problem by providing education and skills that traditionally have been provided by parents? Becker, citing various studies, concludes there is no evidence that will work. What about replacing real mothers with professional day care personnel? Sweden tried this on a grand scale (a literal, Spartan-like nationalization of the family) at great social cost, but produced no evidence of positive effects on children. Early home education, completed at the secondary level with general liberal education in the humanities, offers the surest - now well-tested - solution to the current educational crisis. As schools in general do not offer such an education at the secondary level, home educators must find ways to provide this for their students.  In a 1970 appearance on the TV show //Firing Line //, hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr, Dr. Adler made the same point that liberal education, the backbone of which is study of the Great Books (not student-selected electives), should be completed by the end of secondary (high) school:  "I think the curriculum for liberal studies should be completely fixed. There should be no electives at all. I do not think the student is in any position to make choices about what he should study. I do not think his interests make any difference. They are all human beings; they are all going to become citizens; they are all going to have lots of free time. I think electives – the choice of specialization - should come after the liberal arts degree.  I think the liberal arts degree is given four years too late. I would take American schooling and cut it down, and make it European in this sense: six years of elementary schooling; six years of secondary ( //lycee //, //gymnasium //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> - high school); the collegiate ( //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">i.e //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">., the BA [Bachelor of Arts]) degree coming at the end of that [ //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">i.e //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">., at the conclusion of secondary education - 12th grade in the US]...I might extend that by taking [into account] the differences in the population: I might have the very brightest twelve years [ //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">i.e //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">., through 12th grade] ; for the next level thirteen years; and the last, fourteen years, but not more than fourteen." <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Taking Dr. Adler's words and personal encouragement to heart, in 2000 AD we developed the //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Great Books Program //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> for students high school and college age and up. Like the AP science courses for which high school students can earn college credits for completing courses of college level content and rigor, the //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Great Books Program //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> allows willing students to gain a broad, liberal ( //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">i.e. //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> from //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">liber or libertas //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> - liberty, or freeing from ignorance) education in the humanities through the study of the great books while in high school or college, via distance education, for college credit. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> ||
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">Many years ago - from the Middle Ages to modern times - the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree signified completion of the secondary level of education (following the elementary or primary level) and so readiness to enter into the third level of formal education - the university, for specialization in one's chosen field. With that background in mind, Dr. Mortimer J. Adler wrote: <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> ||
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">"If I had any hope that in the foreseeable future, the educational system of this country could be so radically transformed that the basic liberal training would be adequately accomplished in the secondary [ //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;">i.e., //<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> high] schools and that the Bachelor of Arts degree would then be awarded at the termination of such schooling, I would gladly recommend that the college be relieved of any further responsibility for training in the liberal arts... if we are going to have general human schooling in this country, it has to be accomplished in the first twelve years of compulsory schooling...it would be appropriate to award a bachelor of arts degree at the completion of such basic schooling. Doing so would return that degree to its original educational significance as certifying competence in the liberal arts, which are the arts or skills of learning in all fields of subject matter." <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">

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This article has a lot of good information about Adler kind of a time line on what and when he did for education.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">His earliest work - //Dialectic// (1927) - was a summation of the great philosophical and religious ideas of Western civilization. Here he began to apply his formidable analytical skills. The dialogue of the authors of the great books concerning these ideas then helped him integrate his discoveries. Adler later remarked that in this work he confused philosophy with dialectic, so that discussion about philosophical ideas, short of any conclusions, was for him philosophy itself (he made philosophy, he wrote, merely "a consideration of theories in the realm of the possible, rather than an attempt to state truths about the actual world."), an error he later corrected. Adler (and later, Scott Buchanan) enlarged Erskine's basic idea of bringing together various fields for reading, into a broader view including the sciences, literature, religion, history � all fields of knowledge � into one great educational experience. He and others thoughtfully selected the great books in all areas of human knowledge that were already connected into a great dialogue (by means of references, quotations, or refutations among them), yielding a complete reading and discussion curriculum. Thus a generalized course became a generalized curriculum. What had become more and more compartmentalized into distinct and seemingly unrelated fields of specialized knowledge, was integrated into a whole, by one course/curriculum � the great books program. Adler wrote of this, "that one course...was a college in itself � the whole of a liberal education or certainly the core of it. Not just the books we read...but the discussions...highly civil conversations about important themes and in a spirit of inquiry..." Adler thus became the great synthesist in education, bringing what had seemed many loose threads of Western genius together into one rope. Yet by withholding his conclusions as to where the rope might lead, or end, he invited students to form their own conclusions, which they could only do by studying and discussing each thread in turn. Thus he preserved the singularity of each thread in his synthesis. Like Socrates, he wanted students to draw out conclusions themselves, in dialectical discussion based on their concurrent readings of selections from the great books. Through the use of the dialectic his goal was for students to understand their own conclusions � not merely to memorize his. Adler wrote that what we memorize we can soon forget, but what we understand we never forget. One corollary is that Adler decried the testing mania of our schools, which measure what students memorize (often in cramming sessions), disgorge onto tests, and then soon forget.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">Adler's talent for multi-disciplinary organization and synthesis marked a large part of his subsequent career, and made him the natural choice to be editor of numerous sets of books ranging from Britannica's //Great Books of the Western World// (60 vols.), //The Great Ideas Program// (10 vols.), //Gateway to the Great Books// (10 vols.), //The Annals of America// (20 vols.), and //Encyclopaedia Britannica// (32 vols.) while Chairman of the Board of Editors there, to 50 other books which included much text integrating disparate fields of knowledge (see Adler bibliography above). His //Propaedia// includes his own unique outline of all human knowledge. The //Syntopicon//, which he invented, a topical index to the 102 Great Ideas preeminent in the Great Books, pressed his skills. He really bit off more than he could chew in the one year he thought it would take to complete. It finally took a staff of thirty indexers and sixty clerical helpers ten years to complete, at the then-astronomical cost of one million dollars. This, of course, would not have been possible had he not also powerful analytical skills. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">He had many co-workers in his labors, including the poet Mark Van Doren, but the one that stands out the most is Bob Hutchins. Adler convinced Hutchins, who had recently been named president of the University of Chicago, that Hutchins was uneducated. Hutchins was humble enough to accept that judgement and asked Adler to help him, invited him to Chicago, and began the joint study and co-moderating of great books discussion groups there, with Adler. The program met stiff resistance, but Hutchins remained committed to the course (in the "University College") which gradually made an impact. From both Columbia and Chicago the great books approach to education began to make inroads against the still-dominant "progressive" view of education. The publication of the huge bestseller //How To Read A Book// by Adler in 1940 (still in print) made him a household word across the country. The publication of the Britannica //Great Books// set in 1952, put together by Adler, Hutchins, et al., advanced the classical movement into the homes of average Americans. In the mid-1950s, sales reached nearly 50,000 sets per year and 1 million sets were eventually sold. Thus a course became a curriculum, which became a movement for educational reform: a return to the great works and ideas of Western civilization. Adler became at once America's reigning pedagogue (he appeared on //Firing Line// more than any other guest) as well as the object of attack and scorn, particularly by the educational establishment. But at least through the 1950s, Adler was in the ascent as the classics were returning to classrooms and homes across America earning him the titles "supersalesman of philosophy" and "the Charles Atlas of Western Intellection." After the death of Hutchins in 1977, one name became synonymous with the great books movement: Mortimer J. Adler. Adler said at the time that "the underestimation of the human intelligence is the worst sin of our time." He saw his task as the restoration of philosophy "to its proper place in our culture." Regarding modern philosophy, Adler said (in an interview with Michiko Kakutani of the //New York Times//) that "the twentieth century, for the most part, is an age in which relativism, skepticism, and subjectivism are rampant, and that's what I'm mainly fighting against...modern philosophy got off to a bad start when Descartes and Locke committed the 'besetting sin of modern thought', they ignored Aristotle." <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">After Hutchins left Chicago, two things happened: the faculty at Chicago largely tossed the integrated great books approach overboard; and Hutchins helped Adler raise the funds to initiate the Institute for Philosophical Research. The former event stimulated the reaction of the modern philosophy departments, education departments and entrenched "progressive" teachers' organizations against the great books classical revival. Ultimately they succeeded in crushing the reform "in the generally iconoclastic and anti-retrospective atmosphere of the middle and late sixties" as Adler wrote. It survives here and there in a few colleges. The other change was that Adler focused more and more on deepening his philosophical inquiries into the realms of the ultimate. Out came books on the great ideas, freedom, justice, love, beauty, happiness, truth, religion, God � which he either wrote or edited for the Institute. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">Along with being the father of four sons: Mark, Michael, Douglas and Philip; Adler also helped found the Great Books Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and co-founded the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas (with Max Weismann), in efforts to advance his educational and philosophical ideas. Likewise, in 1982 Adler and a group composed mostly of educators, published //The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto// to advance his ideas on reforming education, principally by introducing the Socratic method ("questioning and discussion groups") into the schools alongside the didactic ("lecturing") and skills instruction ("coaching") modes of teaching, with emphasis on the Socratic method increasing with grade levels. Wherever his advice was followed, the fruits were evident in the improved educational environment, academic skills and understanding of the students and teachers involved. Unfortunately, the resistance to reform had long since galvanized in American educational institutions, despite their steadily declining performance (by any measure). He also promoted the idea that a generalized education, such as the great books and Paideia proposals provide, ought to be pushed back down into the high schools and a Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A.) awarded upon successful completion of that program, at age 16 or so. He maintained that the third level of education � the college or university level � ought to be largely for specialization in one's chosen area, with some interdisciplinary cross fertilization of ideas in a community of scholars (more of a Hutchins' focus than Adler's). Teachers, he believed, should continue a generalized education since they are to be exemplars for their students as professional "learners," in all areas. He would, therefor, abolish all specialized "teachers' colleges"and colleges of education. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">No longer writing books, Adler told this writer that he was pleased his ideas were now being disseminated into the homeschool movement and that there exists plenty of material in his writings to <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">advance his educational ideas there. Indeed, throughout his long educational career, Dr. Adler focused first on helping educate those outside of the institutional educational environment. This stems partly from the resistance of the "progressive" educational establishment to reform; partly to Adler's own experience as a self-educated high school drop-out; and partly from his belief and long experience that a complete education could not possibly be obtained in schools � being the work of a lifetime � and that teachers who thought they could produce fully-educated young people did not understand that they too were merely partially-educated learners. He wrote that only by about age 60 had he finally some claim on the possession of wisdom. 37 years later, he claims to be learning still. No one, no matter how old, says Adler, should stop learning. He has taken his own advice. //-P.S.J.C//
 * || <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">[[image:http://www.classicalhomeschooling.com/assets/images/ADLER.jpg width="200" height="279" align="top"]] ||
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">**Dr. Mortimer J. Adler** ||   ||
 * || <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">[[image:http://www.classicalhomeschooling.com/assets/images/VAN_DOREN.jpg width="123" height="180" align="top"]] ||
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">**Mark Van Doren** ||   ||
 * ||  || <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">On his final TV installment of Firing Line, William F. Buckley, Jr. "cited with pride the fact that the philospher Mortimer J. Adler used Firing Line to explicate his elaborate proofs for the existence of God." - Andrew Ferguson ||   ||   ||
 * || <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">[[image:http://www.classicalhomeschooling.com/assets/images/ADLERbuckjpg.jpg width="322" height="216" align="top"]] ||
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,Univers,Zurich BT,sans-serif;">**Dr. Adler with William F. Buckley Jr. on television.** ||   ||

http://www.classicalhomeschooling.com/html/mortimer_jadler__reforming_e.html

WHAT IS LIBERAL EDUCATION?
by Mortimer Adler

Let us first be clear about the meaning of the liberal arts and liberal educations. The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art, and other so-called "humanities." In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such as mathematics and physics, are considered equally liberal, that is, equally able to develop the powers of the mind. The liberal-arts tradition goes back to the medieval curriculum. It consisted to two parts. The first part, trivium, comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It taught the arts of reading and writing, of listening and speaking, and of sound thinking. The other part, the quadivium, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (not audible music, but music conceived as a mathematical science). It taught the arts of observation, calculation, and measurement, how to apprehend the quantitative aspect of things. Nowadays, of course, we would add many more sciences, natural and social. This is just what has been done in the various modern attempts to renew liberal education. Liberal education, including all the traditional arts as well as the newer sciences, is essential for the development of top-flight scientists. Without it, we can train only technicians, who cannot understand the basic principles behind the motions they perform. We can hardly expect such skilled automatons to make new discoveries of any importance. A crash program of merely technical training would probably end in a crashup for basic science. The connection of liberal education with scientific creativity is not mere speculation. It is a matter of historical fact that the great German scientists of the nineteenth century had a solid background in the liberal arts. They all went through, a liberal education which embraced Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, and history, in addition to mathematics, physics, and other sciences. Actually, this has been the educational preparation of European scientists down to the present time. Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and other great modern scientists were developed not by technical schooling, but by liberal education. Despite all of the ranting and hullabaloo since Sputnik I was propelled into the skies, this has been broadly true of Russian scientists, too. If you will just note the birth dates of the men who have done the basic work in Soviet science, it will be apparent to you that they could not have received their training under any new system of education. As for the present educational setup in the Soviet Union, which many alarmists are demanding that we emulate, it seems to contain something besides technical training and concentration on the natural sciences and mathematics. The aim of liberal education, however, is not to produce scientists. It seeks to develop free human beings who know how to use their minds and are able to think for themselves. Its primary aim is not the development of professional competence, although a liberal education is indispensable for any intellectual profession. It produces citizens who can exercise their political liberty responsibly. It develops cultivated persons who can use their leisure fruitfully. It is an education for all free men, whether they intend to be scientists or not. Our educational problem is how to produce free men, not hordes of uncultivated, trained technicians. Only the best liberal schooling can accomplish this. It must include all the humanities as well as mathematics and the sciences. It must exclude all merely vocational and technical training. []