"Great Books, Democracy, and Truth" - Prologue to "Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind" by Mortimer Adler

Stephen Alexander Beach 

(1469 Words)

Adler opens this prologue with a very directed critique on two scholars who Adler had contact with in his university teaching, that of Allan Bloom and that of Leo Strauss. He begins by referencing Bloom's book, "The Closing of the American Mind", and by pointing out that Bloom makes two fundamental errors. First, that it actually is not going to form American's citizens in true democracy, and second that he does not give reference to those who came before him in the "great books" movement, such as Adler. 1

Adler takes the movement back to John Erskine in the early 1920's at Columbia where he sat around table with undergraduates to discuss great works, of which he created a list of sixty. 2 Without going into the details, Adler describes how this movement grew and spread, involving himself as the center of it at Columbia and the University of Chicago. 3 Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom came later in this movement in the 1950's, as Adler and others began to try to expand these programs for adults. 4 All of Adler's work over the decades culminated in the 1980's with his "Paideia Proposal". "Finally, in 1982, after three years' work with a group of eminent associates, I wrote and published The Paideia Proposal, an educational manifesto that called for a radical reform of basic schooling (kindergarten through twelfth grade) in the United States, and outlined a completely required curriculum that involved great books seminars in elementary and secondary schools." 

More than just retelling the history of the origin of the great books movement, Adler says that he also finds it necessary to speak about the proper way in which the great books must be discussed in the classroom, their role in democracy, and the moral relativism that has plagued the 20th century university. 5 

Education Available for All

Beginning with education's role in democracy, Adler claims that Bloom is not clear in his book as to which idea of democracy he is referring to. Is he referring to the old sense of the word wherein only a select male and land owning class is able to vote? Or does he refer to the 20th century ideal of equality in democracy for everyone? 6 Adler is firmly against a separation in education between those "bound for college" and those not. He holds that this tiered view has been around since Thomas Jefferson, and was not challenged until John Dewey did so in 1900. 7 "In the early 1930's President Hutchins was asked whether great books seminars, then open only to a picked handful of students, should be accessible to all the students in our colleges. His brief reply was crisp and clear. He said that the best education for the best was the best education for all. Great books seminars in our public schools and in our colleges should be available to all the students there, not only to the few who elect to take them or who are specially selected." 

Doctrinal Versus Dialectical

Next Adler turns to his discussion of the method of teaching the great books. He makes the point that the great works are filled with both truth and errors, and it is engaging with both that one can begin to see why the truth rises to the top. "Some basic truths are to be found in the great books, but many more errors will also be found there, because a plurality of errors is always to be found for every single truth." 8 Here Adler critiques Strauss' method of, what he calls, the "doctrinal method" in which the teacher focuses on the the truth of the text, not critiquing it. "The doctrinal method is an attempt to read as much truth as possible (and no errors) into the work of a particular author, usually devising a special interpretation, or by discovering the special secret of an author's intentions. This method may have some merit in the graduate school where students aim to acquire narrowly specialized scholarship about a particular author. But it is the opposite of the right method to be used in conducting great books seminars in schools and colleges where the aim is learning to think and the pursuit of truth." 9 

Mortimer Adler

What happens with this doctrinal style of teaching is that it creates "disciples" and not critical thinkers. The students learn what the teacher thinks, not necessarily engaging with the text themselves. And while this may be profitable in a religious context, it does not work with philosophy and the great works programs. The correct manner in which to teach, according to Adler, is that of the "dialectical" approach in which the students are free to critique and discuss all aspects of the text in discussion with each other, forming conclusions for themselves. "The dialectical teaching of students enables them to think for themselves. I would go further and say that the doctrinal method indoctrinates, and only the dialectical method teaches. Those of us who teach the great books dialectically exert an influence on our students, but only so far as a good use of their minds is concerned. We never makes disciples of them." 10

Moral Relativism

One of the pitfalls in education which certainly impacts something like teaching the great books is that of the culture of moral relativism that has plagued the universities in America, even going back to the 1930's. Adler traces two important influences as to why professors would be pushing such an agenda on their students. First, he references the influence of philosophical Positivism. "At that time, the reign of philosophical positivism among Anglo-American professors gave rise to the doctrine of noncognitive ethics. This meant that moral philosophy was not knowledge, not a body of valid truths. Some went so far as to say that judgments that contained the words 'ought' and 'ought not' were neither true nor false. There were no prescriptive truths." The second factor were anthropologists and sociologists claiming that there were no universal moral truths, as they studied varied cultures around the world. 11

Adler goes on to say that Bloom gets his analysis of this phenomenon wrong by claiming that moral relativism only began in the 1960's, due to the nihilism of Nietzsche. Adler says that Nietzsche had little influence in American at that time, and the causes he proposed go back decades further than the 60's. 

Some Best Practices With the Great Books

At the end of this prologue Adler offers some best practices that these programs should follow. First, the great books should be read and discussed verbally - regarding what they contain that is true and what is false - and this should happen from the early years through adulthood (the early years doing what he calls the "junior great books".) 12 Second, the point is not to teach people history, or "historical knowledge of cultural antiquities". Rather, the point should to teach the student the lifelong skills they will need, such as "critical reading, attentive listening, precise speech, and, above all, reflective thought", as well as providing an introduction to the perennial Western philosophical ideas which never go away. If the great works seem too difficult, that is okay because it is only in engaging with difficulty that the mind can grow appropriately. 

Leo Strauss

Allan Bloom

A very interesting point that Adler then makes is that schools cannot educate someone in a complete sense. Their education will always be incomplete and partial, and thus the goal should be to give them the tools they need to continue their education on their own and into adulthood. "No one ever becomes a gradually educated person in school, college, or university, for youth itself is an insuperable obstacle to becoming generally educated. That is why the very best thing that our educational institutions can do, so far as general education is concerned (not the training of specialists), is to afford preparation for continued learning by their students after they leave these institutions behind them. That cannot be done unless the skills of learning are cultivated in school and unless, in schools and colleges, the students are initiated into the understanding of great ideas and issues and are motivated to continue to seek an ever-increasing understanding of them". 13

Adler concludes by pointing out that the majority of the great books are written by Europeans, and that this does not mean that other books shouldn't be read for their contemporary relevance, but that these books have captured perennial questions that must be engaged with ... not to learn history, not to become specialists, but to keep those central ideas in our common mind. 14

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1 - Adler, Mortimer. Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988. xix

2 - xx

3 - xxi

4 - xxii

5 - xxiii

6 - xxiv

7 - xxv

8 - xxvi

9 - xxvii

10 - xxviii

11 - xxix

12 - xxx

13 - xxxi 

14 - xxxii, xxxiii