Mortimer Adler

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A government consists of men who, in one way or another, have come to occupy the offices of ruling their fellows. Either they perform the task of ruling for the sake of the common good, for the well-being of the community, or instead of seeking to serve the common interests of the governed, they misuse their offices to further their own private interests. Furthermore, the common good is not an end in itself; the well-being of the community is a good because it contributes to the happiness of the citizens. ”

“ The only hope is in the young, for if they are truly liberally educated they will become sensitive to contradictions, and if, in addition, they come to understand and respect the authority of reason in human affairs, they may be saved from the confusions of false liberalism. Our hope must be for a better education, an education which democracy not only makes possible but needs, for in the rectification of liberalism itself, in the school and in the state, lies the promise of maturity for American democracy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ School has given them neither the equipment nor the impulse to continue their education out of school. Their intelligence, of whatever degree, has been so untrained and so uncultivated, that they will be ready to follow the first demagogue who seeks to beguile them.
If, as Thomas Hobbes observes, a democracy tends to degenerate into an oligarchy of orators, and even sometimes, as we have recently seen abroad, into the tyranny of the leading orator of the land, then education in this country, as judged by its high school products, is inimical to democracy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is not the liberality and equality which constitute democracy as the social order in which popular sovereignty is most fully realized because, through the discipline of reason, men have the authority to govern themselves and use the freedom of self-government. ”

“ The contemporary world, I almost regret to say, has not allowed us to forget this ancient truth. We in America have come to cherish our good institutions with renewed vigor because of the contrast that is afforded by the obviously bad societies in the world today. We regard our institutions as good because they respect the integrity, the sanctity, of human beings, and aim to help them achieve good lives. ”

“ The false liberalism of which I speak is nowhere more dominant than among our professional educators, our teachers colleges, and our college faculties. The vicious circle of reciprocal causality is nowhere more manifest than in our educational system. Our educators are themselves the products of our schools and colleges and their liberalism signifies the extent to which our institutions have failed to accomplish liberal education. ”

“ Although he usually denies man's free will, he is almost always at the same time a voluntarist, by which I mean that he affirms, by implication at least, the absolute primacy and inviolability of the will. Making the mistake of supposing that law is an expression of the sovereign will, rather than a command of reason, he must necessarily regard government as an organization of force, an imposition which violates his sacred will. ”

“ The trouble with American education today is not merely that in many quarters the end of liberal education has been forgotten or mistaken, but that the means have been corrupted or deformed. These are related occurrences, for when educators bend their efforts toward making school and college a training camp for citizenship—insisting even that the organization and administration of the school be a miniature democracy so that the pupil can get inoculated with small doses—they also turn the curriculum, if they retain that odious thing at all, into a scheme of indoctrination. ”

“ Throughout their writings they confuse authority, which is nothing more than the voice of reason, with autocracy, which is the violent imposition of a will by force; they confuse discipline with regimentation; they convert the equality of human beings as persons, sharing in a common nature and a common end, into an equality of individuals, despite the differences in their capacities and their merits. ”

“ The distinction here between the contrary senses of "liberal" and "liberalism" turns upon a true and a false conception of the nature and place of liberty in human life. The liberalism I have been attacking as false is false because it misconceives the role and extent of liberty in human affairs. It is this false liberalism which is as much a part of our eighteenth-century heritage as the good democratic institutions which we have preserved and developed. The founding fathers did not speak a pure political truth, a truth unmixed with error ”

“ The tyrant—and tyranny can be taken as the name for any unjust rule—not only misuses his office by considering only his own advantage, but usually tries to conceal his violence by identifying his own fortunes with the state itself, and then making the success of the state the paramount good which all men must serve, though they perish spiritually as well as physically in the process. ”

“ The reason for the unalterable inadequacy of science is not far to seek. Science can measure and observe, can collect facts of all sorts and generalize from such collections, but neither the facts nor the generalizations can by themselves answer questions about what should be done in education. Such questions require us to consider what is good and bad, to define the ideals or norms of human life and human society, and this is the work of the moral and political philosopher.
The ultimate questions involved in the problem of emotions and the educative process are all moral. ”

“ For whereas another can speak to me with authority in so far as I can discern therein reason's commands, a voice that proclaims nothing but another's will speaks only in the language of force, and must either oppose or submit my will according to our relative mights. Furthermore, voluntarism, in subordinating reason, tends to merge the will and the passions, so that the ruling principle in society or the individual is merely the force of desire as such, and everyone seeks a maximum freedom to follow his own inclinations. ”

“ Public education in a democracy serves the state not simply by making children into faithful democrats, but primarily through serving the welfare of its citizens, not merely as subjects of the state, but as free men. In fact, unless education makes men free it cannot serve democracy at all. ”

“ Of course, we must remember that some high school graduates go to college, and among these, perhaps, are a few who have profited from their schooling. But we can derive little consolation from this thought because here, too, the facts prevent us. Though they are even more obliged by their historic mission to perform the work of liberal education, the liberal arts colleges fail on their level as badly, if not worse, than the high schools do on theirs. Our colleges produce undisciplined and hence unliberated minds, minds which are cultivated only by a superficial literacy. ”

“ When I say that American education has failed to achieve liberal ends by liberal means—and is still moving in the wrong direction—I appeal for support to the obvious facts with which we are all acquainted. ”

“ But if democratic citizens must be free men, they must have free minds, and minds cannot be made free except by being disciplined to recognize only one authority, the authority of reason. That discipline is accomplished only when the intelligence is trained to work critically on all matters; only when every human doctrine or policy, even that of democracy itself, is submitted to the examination of reason ”

“ It is a basic tenet of American democracy that men have sacred rights above the state. While admitting that its present forms and operations may be far from perfect, we are, nevertheless, compelled to honor the institutions and practices of our government as abiding by this principle of justice. The corollary which would seem to follow is that American education is fundamentally sound, because we seek to solve the problem of education in our democracy only by determining what is good education for all men everywhere. ”

“ Along with law enforcement agencies, public health service, military forces, the educational system is one of the instrumentalities of government, and in a sense the most important because it is entirely positive and constructive in its operations. All of these implements of government are well employed only if they are directed to the ends which government must itself serve, in order to be just, namely the common good immediately, and the happiness of men ultimately. ”

“ It is not just a play on words to say that the aim of liberal education is to make men free, and for this reason democracy must sustain and extend liberal education or perish, since democracy is the society of free men. ”

“ That the cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude is as certain a truth as any theorem in geometry, and as universal and objective, independent of the mores of the tribe and of your and my private prejudices.
I am not saying that the human race has solved the problem of how to train its young, how to cultivate the virtues, but I see no evidence that scientific research has substantially improved our position in this regard. ”