FIRinG Line MORTIMER ADLER GUEST: "MORTIMER ADLER AND EDUCATION" SUBJECT: 6/7/89 #823 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION

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1 The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use of this material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. FIRinG Line GUEST: SUBJECT: MORTIMER ADLER "MORTIMER ADLER AND EDUCATION" 6/7/89 #823 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION

2 SECA PRESENTS FIRinG Line The FIRING LINE television series is a production of the Southern Educational Communications Association, PO Box 5966, Columbia, SC and is transmitted through the facilities of the Public Broadcasting Service. FIRING LINE can be seen and heard each week through public television and radio stations throughout the country. Check your local newspapers for channel and time in your area. HOST: GUEST: SUBJECT: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. MORTIMER ADLER "MORTIMER ADLER AND EDUCATION" FIRING LINE is produced and direc ted hy WARREN STEIBEL This is a transcript of the Firing Line program taped in New York City on June 7, 1989, and telecast later by PBS. SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION Board of Trustees of the L and Stanford Jr. University.

3 It is always good news that Mortimer Adler has written another book, and the year does not go by when he lets us down. This time around his book is provocatively titled, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind. It is a collection of essays he has written on the subject of education, published, or else transcribed from lectures, beginning in 1939 and stretching to the current day. No one seriously competes with Mr. Adler as the reigning pedagogue on the American scene, and for that reason this collection is especially welcome. But his prologue in this book makes a very sharp attack on Allan Bloom, whose book on The Closing of the American Mind, was a great bestseller. Whereas one would think that the two authors had much in common, Mr. Adler ventures here to emphasize what it is that they do not have in common. ~ 1989 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION In the past decade we have devoted at least two sessions of this program to describing Mr. Adler's own formula for successful education, which he calls the Paideia Proposal. Inevitably we will touch on this, but it is probably of paramount interest to focus on what it is that Mr. Adler finds wrong in a colleague who wrote deploring the inattention given to the Great Books in American education and to the cultural relativism that is the issue of that ignorance. Accordingly, I begin by asking Mr. Adler, inasmuch as you and Bloom believe in reading the Great Books, why is it that you belittle the attention he gives to them? Because he pays no attention to the fact that the Great Books program in liberal education at the college level, just at the college level, began at Columbia University in I was in the first class that John Erskine taught. That was the beginning of the Great Books movement and it was the invention of the seminar that was Erskine's great invention. Bloom and his college at the University of Chicago do not conduct seminars of that kind. When Hutchins went to Chicago from Yale, I went with him and brought the Great Books program from Columbia there. We taught the Great Books at Chicago from 1930 to And again, Mr. Bloom pays no attention to that at all and acts as if he were inventing all this. Well, that's an act of historical negligence, but it doesn't get to the question of what it is that he gets around to saying, which doesn't in fact rest on your shoulders. He in fact doesn't describe the-- He merely mentions--he has one reference to the old Great Books idea and he doesn't expand its role in liberal education. He doesn't explain the seminar method. In fact, the book is not about the Great Books at all. The reference to the Great Books is a minor reference in the book. Well, he deals with the Great Books as repositories of great value, but in one of your programs three or four years ago you pointed out the great mistakes of the Great Books. Precisely, yes. Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University. I I 1

4 And here in this book in your prologue you distinguish between what you call the dialectical and doctrinal teaching. Precisely. Explain to us what the difference is between doctrinal and dialectical teaching. The good conduct of a seminar should not have the participants of the seminar end up by repeating what the teacher tells them. In fact, he shouldn't be telling them anything. He should be asking them questions that lead them to think for themselves and find, wherever they can, the answers to the questions raised. The dialectical method is a questioning method and not a declarative method, the method of laying down the truth as Mr. Bloom or somebody else sees it. I think perhaps the easiest way of explaining the difference between the way that Hutchins and I taught the Great Books in Chicago and the way Allan Bloom and his teacher taught them is that, they made disciples of their students. I don't think in all the years of my teaching--and I think I can say that I have been a very effective teacher--that I have made a disciple. My aim was not to have the students learn what I thought. It was my helping them to think for themselves. Well, there are disciples of two kinds. There can be pedagogical disciples. John Dewey had a lot of those, people who felt, "Well, John Dewey knows how to teach." Or there can be dogmatic disciples. Christ has dogmatic disciples. Now, are you saying--you are surely not telling me that you made no pedagogical disciples. No-- Since you are thought of as the-- I'm saying the opposite. I am saying I have made no doctrinal, no dogmatic disciples. Now, is that because you are non-dogmatic or is it because you fail--you resist the temptation to communicate your final reading of Aristotle? pedagogical discipline to withhold those conclusions from students, or to teach them how you arrived at those conclusions? I would, I think on that question, have those students try to understand why the general will is not the same as the will of all, which is a basic distinction itself, and I would keep on asking questions about it. I wouldn't-- See, Leo Strauss and his disciples--in this case, Allan Bloom--do not read all the Great Books. I mean, they read mainly the many thee-political philosophers. They have certain authors that they regard as containing the truth, whereas in the Great Books seminar that Hutchins and I were connected with, or Erskine and I at columbia, we had the whole range of authors. They included metaphysical authors, theological authors, historical authors, as well as all the great literary works, and our aim was, shall I say, have the students face again and again the problems that have arisen in the human mind in the last 25 centuries with all the answers--many of them are false answers. I mean, the thing I said in the opening-- I'll quote you: "If Aristotle's political philosophy is said to contain a number of fundamental truths, then errors must be found in Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau--" Precisely. Precisely. And Leo Strauss would handle that problem how? Basically he would somehow try to find secret interpretations that would avoid the contradictions. He would circumnavigate them. That's right. Well then, if I understand you correctly, you've got a problem with Allan Bloom that he doesn't situate his recommendations historically, and the second problem, that to the extent that he situates them at all, he fails to say about them that which primarily commends the Great Books. Precisely. How do you account for the astonishing public success of a book that is really quite difficult to get through? Because I always, I think, led the students to question me and argue with me and I argue against them. I mean, I've always tried to argue what I thought was the right answer. But I didn't act as if I had the key to the book's truth. You mean, whatever your conclusions. If the book had been published with the title, a very queer title, that Allan Bloom himself gave it,!.don't. think it would have sold at all. It was the extraord~nary w~t of Simon and Schuster's editors to give the title of the book, The Closing of the American Mind: How our Institutions of Higher Learning Have Failed Democracy. Yes, whatever my con lusions. Well, the editors' wit didn't persuade them to publish more than 10,000 copies in the first printing. Suppose the subject of, say, the general will, as taught by Rousseau, came up. No matter what conclusions you ' had arrived at about the general will, is it a part of your l I 3 2 Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University.

5 That's right. I think it was extraordinary insight on that. My other objection, I think, is even more serious, though. And that is that I think Allan Blo~rn did not give a correct account of the moral relativism and skepticism of the 20th century. to ask you. Explain that, because that was my next point It's more important. This is the century--it wasn't true of the 19th century--in which cultural anthropology, and comparative sociology arose, and those are the sources. Positivism in philosophy [unintelligible] school, the analytic school in England, and the teaching of sociologists and the cultural anthropologists, the mores of the tribe. It all began, by the way, in the 17th century with Montaigne. Montaigne anticipated relativism of the tribal mores. Who is to say A is better than B? That's right. In fact he says nothing is good or evil but thinking it makes it so. And that is the beginning of moral relativism and the actual academic appearance of it didn't occur-- Montaigne anticipated it, but the actual appearance of it in school carne with the rise of the social science departments. If you go back to the universities of the last century, they didn't exist. Well, it carne in also via law, didn't it? I think John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes-- DR. ADLER; More Holmes than Mill. Yes, but even Mill said that as long as one person disagrees with a finding, that finding must be held to be problematical. He was talking about-- Mill, in the second chapter on liberty, was concerned not with tolerating all opinions, but was pursuing the truth. He wanted to hear them argued out fully. Yes. But not for the sake of tolerating all the opinions, but-- But applying that to democratic findings, as long as there is a single dissenter, the question is open. So that was certainly an introduction to relativist morals, wasn't it? The students that I met at the University of Chicago in the '30s would always say that there are no objective answers to value questions. Value judgments are neither true nor false. That is so ingrained in the teaching at colleges., You learned it at Yale as I learned it at Columbia. Bloom's account of this in terms of the influence of Nietzsche is wrong. It's simply incorrect. The students that I met in the '30s and '40s had never read Nietzsche and they were moral relativists and subjectivists. So the book has an account--he is correct in being concerned, as I am concerned and you are concerned with the moral relativism-- But he's wrong in the etiology. That's right, yes. Well now, to what extent does that matter? That is to say, if we know that this is a problem and it's called to our attention, one can freshly inquire as to the foundations of it. Let me-- In the book there are four chapters that I think are right on the point. One of them is the essay I wrote for Harpers in 1941 on the pre-war generation-- Which was a highly publicized statement, yes. And then recently I reviewed books by Alasdair Macintyre and Bernard Williams. Both of them admit that Aristotle, in the whole history of Western European philosophy, the one book on ethics that carne near to being sound, in their judgment, was Aristotle's Ethics. Aristotle, yes. They both say it was sound for the ancient world but it is not sound for us. My real point here is that I don't'think all the technological advances, all of the institutional changes that have taken place since the 5th century or the 4th century B.C. make any difference at all in the truths in Aristotle's Ethics. In fact I would dare to say, and I would challenge anyone to argue me on the point, that the ~nly really sound, pragmatic, and undogmatic, moral philosophy 1s Aristotle's Ethics. And it's just as sound today as it was in the 4th century. Now, when you say undogmatic, you distract me, because we know that Aquinas leaned very heavily on Aristotle, didn't he? Undogmatic in the sense that it doesn't contain any prescriptions on how to behave. It recommends moral virtue. And what is moral virtue but the choice of the right end and the right means to it. The habitual choice, the habitual dedication of the right end, the goal of life, is leading a good life-- But doesn't that leave the modern relativist with the option of deciding what's the right Board of Trustees of the L ~ land Stanford Jr. University.

6 No. Because Aristotle has the answer to that point. He makes the distinction between real goods and apparent goods. The distinction, a very important distinction-- There are two kinds of good. There are some things we cail good because we desire them. There are some things we ought to desire because they are really good. Normative good. That's right. And I would say to you, among them, there is one, only one, self-evident proposition in the whole field of moral thought, and that is that we ought to seek everything that is really good for us and nothing else. Now, play that on your piano as follows: The way to test a proposition is to see if you can think the opposite. Think the opposite. We ought not to seek what is really good for us? We ought to seek what is really bad for us? Both of those are unthinkable. If the opposite of a proposition is unthinkable, then you have a self-evident truth. Well, what is really good for me or what is really good for us? For man. Human beings. What we need in terms of our natural desires. Has there, to your knowledge, ever been a tyrant in modern times, or even late modern times, who thinks of himself as having relied on Aristotelian logic? I don't think so. I don't think so. Was Napoleon learned in the subject or not? I don't think so. How about Bismarck? I can't answer that one. So as far as you know, it hasn't ever been abused. And therefore, there.is no empirical evidence that anybody leaned on Aristotle and carne to really decadent conclusions. No evidence at all. And when I say undogmatic, almost every other moral philosopher in the modern world, since the 17th century, tries to, in rules of conduct-- If you look at the whole Aristotle Ethics, there are no rules of conduct at all except the prescription that one ought to seek what is really good for you. Then you ask yourself, what in human nature is really good for it in terms of what our fundamental, natural needs are? And then the answer is-- Augustine almost, almost said it in one sentence, leaving one thing out. Augustine said, "Happy is the man who in the course of a full life has everything he desires, provided he desire nothing amiss." Now, what is moral virtue? Moral virtue is the habitual inclination to desire nothing amiss. What did he leave out? Aristotle adds to that. Aristotle says moral virtue--and again, he is the only philosopher in the whole 25 centuries that said this: Moral virtue is necessary for a good life, but not sufficient--one needs good fortune. The element of chance-- What we call grace. Yes. What a Christian would call grace and the pagan would call good luck. You see, he gives us the case of Priam. He uses the word "blessedness." Priam is a morally virtuous man and he was on the road to happiness, but he was not blessed by good fortune. Troy fell. His wife and children were taken into slavery, his sons were killed. His life ended poorly. Of course further he says, one should never declare about a man, that he had a good life until it's over. You can't tell what will happen in the last 10 years. So no matter how you persevere in the correct direction, you can be-- You can be beset by ill fortune. Yes, you can suffer as Job suffered. Now, a morally virtuous man will be able to withstand the arrows of outrageous misfortune better than a vicious man. In the sense that it teaches fortitude. Yes. He will be a morally good man without a morally good life. Right. Right. Well, how did Marx handle Aristotle? Marx--it's a very funny thing. Marx was a good student of the Greek philosophy. In fact he took his PhD in Dernocritus and atomism. He quotes Aristotle, Aristotle's Ethics, this chapter on justice on the labor theory of value. He says Aristotle correctly says, what are the rates of exchange in a nonmonetary economy, a barter economy? How many beds should be exchanged for pairs of shoes? His answer on that page is that if it takes a carpenter a week to make a bed and only a day for the shoemaker to make a pair of shoes in a day-- It would be seven to one. Seven to one. Actually Marx says that Aristotle has caught on to the labor theory of values. On the next page, Aristotle says, that's not the answer. It's supply and demand. It's the market. And Marx ignores it. 6 7 Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University.

7 \ Was that early on detected by critics of Marx? It's a rather singular omission, isn't it? I detected it. I was so struck by that. I went back and looked at that page, and he's got the-- rt ' s right on the next page. And that has got to have been intentional, right? It couldn't have been careless. No. Well, to get back to your-- Let me ask you what might seem to be an odd question under the circumstances. In your judgment, is there anything in Bloom's book that would collide with the prescriptions of your own book? Why would Bloom dislike the Paideia Proposal? He didn't mention it. I know he didn't. But if he were asked to review this book, leaving the prologue aside, what is there that you say that in effect would offend the-- I can tell you quite quickly. I am a democrat. He's not. You're saying he's elitist. That's right. As a matter of fact, he teaches only the very special student. I do. together. Yes. Not I. You think everybody is educable-- --unlike, say, Albert Jay Nock-- I think that he and Nock would go to bed I may be wrong about that, but-- I think you're correct about that particular proposition. However, what we don't really know, unless you are prepared to conclude already the Paideia experiment as successful, is who's correct. Well, I can tell you one answer to that question. I had a visiting teacher from Australia who came in to see the schools in Washington and Chicago went to the Goldblatt School, where the Paideia had been established for seven years, six years, and wrote me--i will send you a copy of the letter--a most enthusiastic account. She said she was going back to Australia and see if she could put Paideia into Australian schools. She just could not believe that in an all-black school in one of the worst ghettoes in Chicago-- We recently had a graduating class of 54 students and asked them to pledge themselves to go on-- The high schools they were going to were not Paideia. We have the money to give them special seminars every other Saturday morning, and 25 of them are going out of their way to go to those special seminars reading the Great Books. of them. Is that enough? No, out of 54 graduates I would like to have all But is it enough to simply tutor them on a half day at a seven day stretch? They're going to high schools where there is no Paideia. We want to be sure they continue with the reading of the Great Books. So you are satisfied that you have already taught them techniques and that these techniques can carry on throughout their educational careers and postformative years. We also have a high school, we have a Paideia school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which now has Paideia very actively installed from kindergarten through the ninth grade. K-12 schools are using Paideia. I think-- Paideia was launched in This is Eight years. Seven or eight years. I think it is remarkable that we have 150 schools in the United States that are in varying degrees Paideia schools. Why mightn't Bloom say to you, "Look, Professor Adler, you go ahead and do your system. I like it very much and I encourage you to do it. But to use your own metaphor, if you have a quart here and you have learning here and this particular person has an innate capacity of just so much, you won't fill the bottle that high. Give me those who reach to the top and let me supplement it." leaders-- If he simply is saying every society must have Must and will. Sure, we'll have leaders. I'm not only interested in only educating the leaders. I can't say anything about that. Suppose he says that the elite in this country are not being well trained-- I agree with him-- They're cultural ignoramuses and-- Let me give you an example. I recently was in Atlanta at the invitation of the Coca-Cola Company interviewing 150 students who were at the very top of their class. These 150 students were all A students. Every one of them was either one, two, three, four, five or in their class standing, graduating 8 9 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.

8 from high schools all over the country. I was a member of a committee that interviewed them. And I happened to ask the questipn, "What books have you read?"--to all these students now going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech and so forth--"what books have you read? They can be nonfiction books that were not assigned as part of your coursework." The answer was none. There wasn't a student of those scholars, who were given scholarships by the Coca-Cola Company, who had done any reading in high school at all. Well, 50 years ago, Robert Hutchins told you he had only read three of them, and he became president of the university. Yes. Yes. To the extent that democracy meant universalizing the suffrage, which it didn't mean for quite awhile. After all, women didn't vote. Well, I think that-your differences are well spelled out and I thank you very much and I urge all of your fans to read Reforming Education: The-- What is the subtitle again? Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind. OR. ADLER: I think they'll find in the book how deep the roots of Paideia are. Thank you, Dr. Adler. But he remedied that. Right. But therefore the incidence of what you are talking about hasn't necessarily changed in 50 years. OR. ADLER: No, it hasn't, except that this is now--you would think that the top students in the country, they are so engaged in taking examinations and making good grades that most of them haven't been into the school library. And a library outside, they haven't seen those at all. They are illiterate. Bloom was correct. Illiterate or unlearned? OR. ADLER: Unlearned. Culturally illiterate. Right. But Bloom would deplore that, and he'd say, "Let's have a little more Adlerism--" My objection to Bloom is he is not concerned with the fact that now we have universal suffrage and most of our young people are going to be citizens and vote..you see, Albert Jay Nock was correct: If you took his recommendations on the educable and the ineducable, we should not make the ineducable citizens. We have made them citizens--i'd better be right about this. Because if I am wrong, and they are ineducable, then we've made a mistake about democracy. Well, you invite really a scrutiny of the whole political question. John Stuart Mill thought that nobody should be given the vote who didn't vote for the commonweal, and as you pointed out once, he thought that people on welfare should be denied the vote. He also thought that those were better educated should be given plural voting--i mean, two votes or three votes. That's right. John Stuart Mill was a very reluctant democrat Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.