Word: adler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...young professor at the University of Chicago, with its bellwether development of a liberal-arts core, Adler would have seemed to be in his element. But his freewheeling style so offended colleagues in the philosophy department that his friend and patron, President Robert Maynard Hutchins, had to tuck Adler into the law school, where he held the informal title of Professor of Blue Sky. He has always cherished the role of what he calls a "non grata in academe," preferring to communicate his message, largely through his books, to America at large. He has done so with such success that...
Five years ago Adler introduced an iconoclastic program he calls the Paideia (from the Greek word for raising a child) to schools in Atlanta, Chicago and Oakland. Unlike conventional curriculums, with their set-piece texts and lectures, fast-track studies for bright kids and vocational dead ending for slower ones, the Paideia presents the same material to all students, conveyed through Socratic talk between teachers and pupils. It is Adler's conviction that every child can handle the richest offering of broad, humanistic learning. While he concedes that intellectual capacities vary, by his own metaphor, from half-pint to gallon...
...Adler's critics, of whom there are many, dismiss him as a hip shooter, the fastest opinion west of the Hudson but not worth serious attention. Yet Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, admires Adler's contentiousness. Adler has fought for the idea, says Botstein, that thought "is too important to be left to the Ph.D.s." Declares Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: "He's taken cherished institutions by the scruff of the neck and said, 'Enough...
...indications there will be more scruff-of-the-neckmanship as Adler continues to preach and practice his doctrine. During a recent visit to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Adler challenged a roomful of students with a dialogue on Plato. He put them through a rattling seminar that left the students exhausted and with some urgent questions hanging in the air. "That's the purpose of the seminar, to get you all worried," he told them happily. Worried they were, but Adler departed with his conviction undisturbed -- that pupils of any age can be educated, and the way to do that...
...counting, Reformer Mortimer Adler brings out his 40th book -- and lets fly, as usual, at the learning establishment...