Mortimer Adler

“ In terms of this very brief and sketchy analysis of the parts of life, and of these distinctions between work, play, and leisure activities, we now can see clearly the difference between vocational training and liberal education. Vocational training is learning for the sake of earning. I hope I step on nobody's toes too hard when I say, as I must say, that therefore it is an absolute misuse of school to include any vocational training at all. School is a place of learning for the sake of learning, not for the sake of earning. ”

“ A teacher who has succeeded in bringing us to the light many times in the past despite our intransigence, is one who deserves our patience in the present instance where we are still in the dark. This is the mark which honors the great teachers of all times. In the tradition of European learning, some men have been the teachers of many generations, of many epochs. The fact that these men are so generally honored by the tradition as great teachers—men who both know and can communicate—is the most compelling extrinsic sign of an authority to which we must respond with docility. ”

“ This September the University of Chicago celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. This September the world may not have time or patience to give much attention to an academic celebration—to its learned symposia, its recital of degrees honoris causa, its ritual of eulogy. But if there is still any time left for us to think about what we are doing we might well use a little of it to consider the institution and development of a university which, more than any other, reflects the temper of our culture. ”

“ If, on the contrary, we begin by affirming man's natural freedom as his God-given power of free choice, we see that this freedom is, in itself, neither good nor evil morally, since it is equally the condition under which men perform good and bad acts. Freedom is morally good only when it is well used. That is why St. Augustine defined the moral virtues as the proper use of our freedom. It follows, furthermore, that civil liberty is good only to the extent that it comports with justice. Not that government which governs least or most is best, but only the one which governs most justly. ”

“ Unless we acknowledge that every invitation to learning can promise pleasure only as the result of pain, can offer achievement only at the expense of work, all of our invitations to learning, in school and out, whether by books, lectures, or radio and television programs will be as much buncombe as the worst patent medicine advertising, or the campaign pledge to put two chickens in every pot. ”

“ Whereas opinion is an affirmation by the intellect as moved by the will or the passions, knowledge is a motion independent of the will. To know is to judge entirely in the light of reason. The truth as we see it in such light compels our judgment. If the authority of a teacher consisted in nothing but the truth he spoke, then we could justly recognize his authority only to the extent that, by the natural light of our own reason, we could independently discriminate between truth and falsity on the point of doctrine. There would be no need for docility toward him as a man. ”

“ To suppose that all men living at any time or place are subject to the same fundamental canons of right and wrong, however diverse their manners or mores; to suppose that all men, precisely because they are all men, sharing equally the same human nature, should be motivated by the same ideals of truth and goodness—that is the demon of absolutism which every social science course in the curriculum tries to exorcise. ”

“ Let me begin where anyone has to begin—with a tentative definition of education. Education is a practical activity. It is concerned with means to be employed or devised for the achievement of an end. The broadest definition with which no one, I think, can disagree is that education is a process which aims at the improvement or the betterment of men, in themselves and in relation to society. Few will quarrel with this definition because most people are willing to say that education is good; and its being good requires it to do something that is good for men. ”

“ In any roomful of people, we would pick out the liberally educated man or woman as the one who manifests all the goods which belong to the intellect. These goods—the truth and various ways of getting at the truth—contribute to a happy life; they may even be indispensable, as is good moral character and some amount of wealth; but by themselves they do not make a man happy. A liberally educated man, lacking the goods which liberal education does not provide, can be more miserable than those who have these other goods without the benefit of liberal education. ”

“ We do not seem able to appreciate a new departure in thought which occurs by way of addition to the old. Novelty by itself does not stir us; it must be proclaimed as dispensing us from former allegiances. We are not content to say "This too is true"; we must revolutionize thought by saying "Nothing but this is true." If the positive points in the Chicago movement had been temperately affirmed, truth might have been increased, even transformed, by their addition; but there would probably be no record today of any Chicago School of Thought. ”

“ We have come to assume that liberalism is the absence of authority because we can no longer distinguish between authority and tyranny. We have forgotten that the mind that denies the authority of reason falls under the tyranny of caprice. We have forgotten that he who will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rock. We have therefore allowed totalitarian dictators to take out a copyright on words like authority and discipline, although their tyranny is a caricature of authority and their terrorism is a caricature of discipline. ”

“ If I were asked to name the virtue which most singularly distinguishes Jacques Maritain as a philosopher, I would say his docility. All of its manifestations will be detected by those who see how deeply his Thomism is motivated by a sense of the future. Philosophy is perennial for him, not as a monument which endures the ravages of time, but as a living thing which enjoys time as its dimension of change and growth. ”

“ Many of the obvious disorders of human life result from improper understanding of the order of these parts—for example, sleeping for its own sake, which is at least neurotic and at worst suicidal; working as an end in itself, which is a complete perversion of human life; working for the sake of play, which is certainly a misconception of leisure; or free time as time to kill in pleasure seeking. Play for its own sake, in order to kill time or escape boredom, is as neurotic as sleep for its own sake. And perhaps I should add the error, which many of us make, of confusing leisure with rest. ”

“ Strangely enough, it is much easier to solicit preparedness for war than preparedness for peace. Men can be energized into action, even radical reforms, when the issues are urgent enough, and the ends not much beyond their noses. The long term objectives are seldom achieved by the purposeful planning of man or the concerted action of nations. They are reached, slowly and painfully, through the inscrutable windings of history. Education will not shake off its typical modern faults until history is ready for the end of modern times and the birth of a new cultural epoch. ”

“ But below the level of the university, apart from men competent in scholarship or research, the major learning is by instruction, and the kind of thinking therein involved is inseparable from processes of communication. In so far, therefore as I restrict myself to the basic education of youth—youth incompetent to discover anything by itself—I can say that there is no significant operation of thinking apart from such operations as reading and listening, writing and speaking, and there is no art of thinking other than the three liberal arts as arts of language or communication. ”

“ Now the attitude of the various agencies of adult education is even more softminded—not just softhearted—about the large public they face, a public which has had all sorts and amounts of schooling. The trouble is not simply that this large public has been spoiled by whatever schooling it has had—spoiled in the double sense that it is unprepared to carry on its own self-education in adult life and that it is disinclined to suffer pains for the sake of learning. ”

“ They want freedom to such an extent that they wish to be rid of a curriculum as a prescribed course of study. Because it is prescribed, because it expresses the authority of teachers imposed upon students, because it makes teacher and student unequal, it is regarded as undemocratic—as if democracy did not depend, as does every good social order, on leaders and followers, rulers with authority and subjects, not submissive, but well ruled. ”

“ But agreement, which is the concurrence of minds in the truth about things, cannot be reached, cannot even be aimed at by discussion, until there is understanding—the communication of minds through shared meanings in a single universe of discourse. The liberal arts and a common intellectual tradition are, therefore, indispensable prerequisites for the work a university—the one giving men the technic of communication, the other rooting them all in the same cultural soil. ”

“ The dead bones of philosophy are not building materials. Not a reverence for relics, but for the spirit they have disembodied, is the docility which encourages Maritain to regard Saint Thomas as a cooperator in the work of preparing for a philosopher greater than Saint Thomas, as he was greater than Aristotle.
We have considered all the impediments to docility, the difficulties to be overcome in ourselves, in our educational systems and in our culture. It would be wise, in conclusion, to remember a point that is central in the whole theory of virtue, namely, the integration of the virtues. ”

“ The results of leisure activity are two sorts of human excellence or perfection: those private excellences by which a man perfects his own nature and those public excellences which can be translated into the performance of his moral or political duty—the excellence of a man in relation to other men and to society. Hence I would define leisure activities as those activities desirable for their own sake (and so uncompensated and not compulsory) and also for the sake of the excellencies, private and public, to which they give rise. ”

“ What cannot be accomplished educationally through elaborate schemes devised to make learning an exciting game must, of necessity, be forgone. Heaven forbid that learning should ever take on the character of a serious occupation—just as serious as earning money, and perhaps, much more laborious and painful.
The kindergarten spirit of playing at education pervades our colleges. Most college students get their first taste of studying as really hard work, requiring mental strain and continual labor, only when they enter law school or medical school. ”

“ In the whole realm of social thought there can, therefore, be nothing but opinion. Since there is nothing but opinion, everybody is entitled to his own opinion. . . . If everything is a matter of opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion. And, of course, if success is the test of rightness, right is on the side of the heavier battalions. But President Hutchins will not succeed in changing education at Chicago for the same reason that it will not be changed in most of our institutions. ”

“ Only when reason rules the will, however, is a man fully free in his acts. It is not any sort of voluntary conduct which constitutes human freedom, for animals behave voluntarily and so do men under the impulse of their animal passions. Though freedom is in the will, its root or principle is in reason, as a power of deliberation and judgment. Here, again, we see that freedom, far from being the absence of all rule, is rather the submission to a right rule. We are free, in society or in our own acts, when we are properly governed. ”

“ Thus we can combine gratitude toward the past on whose shoulders we stand, with humility toward the future. Neither fawning nor unduly self-reliant, we recognize ourselves as creatures of time. Through a docility thus fortified by a historical sense, we are emancipated both from the dead hand of tradition and from the provincialism of the present moment. Only the docility of the living present can make the tradition live and perpetuate itself through myriad transformations. ”

“ Thinking, it seems to me, is a leisure activity; contemplation, an activity of rest. Accordingly, if rest exists at all in this earthly life, it exists only, I think, in religious activity, only in prayer and worship and in the contemplation practiced by religious orders. From this point of view, all human life is either work or rest. Everything I have subdivided into sleep, play, work, and leisure becomes work, as compared with rest, though there are distinctions on the natural plane that make work just one of four parts. ”

“ Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work—in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think. To make boys and girls, or men and women, think—and through thinking really undergo the transformation of learning—educational agencies of every sort must work against the grain, not with it. ”

“ If the great books should be read, let the teacher do that in the course of his own education or in the privacy of his study. Let him cull the truth from the errors, and feed the young the unblemished fruits.
Here the opposite error is made. Students who are not trained in the liberal arts—and apart from the discipline of reading great books they cannot be—are incapable of the activity of being taught. They are entirely given to the passivity of being indoctrinated. They are not trained to be docile, for docility is required only in the active exercise of one's intellectual powers. ”

“ On the contrary, government itself is an instrument for achieving the common good, and the community thus well maintained is a means toward the perfection of men. When I speak of human happiness as identical with the perfection of human nature, I am not thinking in terms of the utilitarian formula of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I am distinguishing between the individual, whose private and idiosyncratic interests are always subordinate to the common good, and the person, constituted by that essential and spiritual nature in which all men equally share. ”

“ But leisure consists of those intrinsically good activities which are both self-rewarding and meaningful beyond themselves. They need not be confined to themselves. They can be both good things to do and good in their results, as, for example, political activities, the activities of a citizen, are both good in themselves and good in their results. This does not mean that leisure activities are never terminal, never without ends beyond themselves; it means only that they must be good in themselves, things worth doing even if there were no need for them to be done. ”

“ Assuming that an educational system is wisely administered, those who hold the office of teacher are signified as having sufficient authority for the grade of student allotted to them. Unlike the political office, which has a certain authority in itself even when held by a bad man, the doctoral office is truly emptied whenever students who have exercised docility discover its occupant to be unworthy. If the de facto rule of a usurping despot is tyranny, the de facto pressure of an inadequate teacher can only be effective as indoctrination, and that, as we have seen, is a kind of violence. ”

“ Where there is so much heat there is always hope, at least, for the emergence of light.
The Chicago Fight now plays the role in American culture once played by the Chicago School. The university which, in its first period, mirrored the prevailing ideology in its own solidarity of doctrine, still functions as the cultural microcosm. For the past ten years it has been the arena in the spotlight. The heavyweights in its ring have staged a fight for a nationwide audience—an audience drawn not by their lust for blood, but by their genuine concern with the points in issue. ”

“ We must face the fact that, until very recently, the working classes did nothing but sleep and work. When we realize that children started to work at the age of seven; that whole families worked—men, women, and children; that the hours of working time were often twelve and fourteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, then we realize that the distinction between the leisure class and the working class is something you and I can no longer appreciate because it has disappeared from our society. ”

“ The totalitarian regimes misuse education because they misuse men. They must use education, as they use other pressures and propaganda, secret police and concentration camps, to make men into political puppets. Such bad societies, vicious in principle as well as ruthless in execution, cannot afford to consider education as a means for perfecting men and making them happy.
We must condemn the fascist educational program for the same reasons that we condemn fascist government and fascist international policy. ”

“ The living teachers—the local embodiments of learning—are seldom the great teachers. The great teachers are usually dead, though, in another sense, they are eminently alive for us as teachers through their books. Books are instruments of instruction, and obviously call for docility in those who would learn from them, as much as living teachers do. The virtue is essentially the same, whether exercised toward the book of an absent teacher or toward the ministrations of one who is present. ”

“ The liberal exaggerates the province of the will in thought as well as in action. Whereas, in truth, the intellect moves necessarily within the sphere of its proper objects, so that men are not free to affirm what is self-evidently false, or to deny conclusions which are validly demonstrated by true premises, the liberal makes everything a matter of the will to believe. Thinking is not only voluntary as the exercise of our rational power, but it is voluntary in all its acts, so far as what is affirmed or denied is concerned. ”

“ Liberal education in the future of democracy should be and should do for all men what it once was and did for the few in the aristocracies of the past. It should be part of the lives of all men.
But I must be asked whether I have forgotten about individual differences. Even if all men are citizens, even if they are emancipated from the complete drudgery of labor, it still is not true that all men are equally endowed with talent or have an equal capacity to lead the good life. ”

“ I want to consider the problem of docility as it exists for all of us, whether we be merely students in the early stages of our education, or teachers who have realized the need to continue study. The problem, it seems to me, has significant implications for education under modern cultural conditions, precisely because modern culture is so ambivalent about tradition. In its horror of subservience, the modern mind tends to the opposite vice of brash indocility. ”

“ I have said all this illustratively to explain my approach to the problem of general education and the state. I would not be speaking honestly if I pretended that I was going to express my opinions or the opinions of others. There is no room for opinion in philosophy. This applies to practical as well as theoretic philosophy, and to the philosophy of education as a chapter in ethics and politics. I do not mean, of course, that all men agree, but only that their disagreements are not to be regarded as an affair of obstinate prejudices on their part. ”

“ Thus, for example, there can be two reasons for learning carpentry. One might wish to learn carpentry simply to acquire the skill or art of using tools to fabricate things out of wood, an art or skill that anyone is better for having. Or one might wish to learn carpentry in order to make good tables and chairs, not as works of art which reflect the excellence of the artist, but as commodities to sell. This distinction between the two reasons for learning carpentry is connected in my mind with the difference or distinction between liberal and vocational education. ”

“ The definition of docility as the right amount of respect for the authority of teachers (or books) is by itself insufficient to determine action. It is a truth too remote from the exigencies of practice to direct us in the particular decisions we have to make. In this particular case—with this teacher or book, in view of my temperamental weaknesses, my tendencies to be indolent or impatient, and in connection with this point of doctrine abut which I have strong feelings—what is the right amount of respect due those who are trying to instruct me? ”

“ The tradition of American democracy is a great blessing in the modern world, but is not without its blemishes, chief among which is the false liberalism that was present at the beginning and has more recently been augmented by positivism, the skepticism, the anti-rationalism, which are so many noxious weeds that seem to attend the flowering of science in a culture. There is no intrinsic and necessary connection between the principles of democracy and this false liberalism; on the contrary, democracy will become mature only through the cure of this infantile disorder. ”

“ Professional education is vocational only in so far as this kind of leisure activity happens to be a way that some men, in our division of labor, earn their compensation.
Second, liberal education can involve work simply because we find it necessary to compel children to begin, and for some years to continue, their educations. Whenever you find an adult, a chronological adult, who thinks that learning or study is work, let me say that you have met a child. One sign that you are grown up, that you are no longer a child, is that you never regard any part of study or learning as work. ”

“ I merely accepted it because Aristotle had spoken.
In matters of natural knowledge, no human authority should prevail against the light of your own reason. But we know that our thinking is fallible. We know how often we suffer the illusion that we see the truth, only to discover later that we have judged too soon. Hence the second maxim I try to follow is this: one should suspend judgment long enough to be sure that one really understands what the teacher is trying to say before agreeing or disagreeing with him. ”