Word: adler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Surrounded by the classics and a pair of typewriters battered from the writing of 15 books in the past decade, the director of Chicago's Institute for Philosophical Research bounces forward to greet a visitor. "I had two ideas last night," booms Mortimer Adler. This is not a man whose ideas run to trivia. His latest work, "We Hold These Truths" (Macmillan; $16.95), examines the U.S. Constitution, tracking the concept of "rightful authority" back to the Greek statesman Solon, then bringing it forward to culmination in the Constitution's codification of the world's first federal republic. The logic...
Small wonder. Besides having poured out a lifetime total of 40 books, Adler sits as chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, runs his own institute and promotes Britannica's Great Books program (about 250,000 copies sold since 1952), which he conceived and for which he churned out a 1 million-word index in 26 months. Sighs Theodore Sizer, 54, chairman of Brown University's department of education: "If I have that much energy and optimism when I'm his age, I'll be a lucky person...
...Adler's age: 84, a span that he reflects upon with profound satisfaction. "The greatest single piece of good fortune anyone can have," he says, "is work worth doing." To Adler, the essence of that work has been educational reform -- away from trendy relativism and back to absolute values, which he believes should be taught from kindergarten through graduate school. He especially deplores the contemporary notion that metaphysics is nonsense and that science and other subjects can be taught without reference to an individual's responsibility to society. "The lack of standards of right and wrong, good...
...Adler, those standards are clear as the morning. Among them: liberty, truth, goodness, beauty, equality and justice, all of which he expounded on in a 1981 book entitled Six Great Ideas. He has argued, seduced, wheedled and bullied students to embrace these and other (to him) immutable concepts in thousands of seminars across the country. "By the fact that I started to teach," he says, "I discovered school is not an education." Nor, by his lights, is college. In his view, virtually all colleges have given up the essential liberal-arts core curriculum, which now barely survives in what Adler...
...Adler has typically been on the opposite tack from the majority since the beginning of his own education. As a precocious 15-year-old who often told chums, "Be quiet; I'm thinking," he discovered that John Stuart Mill had read Plato by age ten. Forthwith Adler devoured Plato's works. With equal speed and assurance, he acquired his scorn for educational conventions, not to mention conventional educators. Then, as now, he found no use for grades: "What do they measure? The ability of some children to bone up for examinations." Given the power, he would abolish all marks...