Word: adler
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What to do about it? Adler, Hutchins and a band of dedicated fellow guerrillas -notably Stringfellow Barr, former president of St. John's College, Scott Buchanan, former dean of St. John's, and Mark Van Doren, English professor at Columbia-have answered long & loud: make U.S. education truly liberal. That means, according to Adler, that 1) American college professors must commit academic hara-kiri by giving up their specialized fields; they should be able to teach anything in the liberal arts; 2) the scientific method should stick to science, and leave to philosophy the job of determining matters...
...aimless nibbling at knowledge, or to excessive specialization. But there is bitter disagreement as to what should be done. Most Deweyites insist that 20th century students must combine the liberal arts with "useful" studies, and that the learning of the past must be "reconstructed" to fit present needs. Adler feels that this view has led to totally inadequate half measures, i.e., digested "survey" courses in the humanities. But there are signs that the great battle-variously expressed as Humanists v. Pragmatists, Thomists V. Positivists,* Adler v. the rest of U.S. education -is slowly beginning to turn...
...ground swell is strong and deep: Adler, Hutchins & Co. are only part of it. The atom bomb, more than anything else, showed the U.S. that (in Adler's words) "the more science we have the more we are in need of wisdom to prevent its misuse." Reinhold Niebuhr expressed a growing uneasiness in the U.S. conscience over confused and slipshod morality. Arnold Toynbee found wide response when he attacked the easy optimism which regards history as an endless escalator to progress rather than a continuing struggle between good & evil. The Harvard report on U.S. education (TIME...
...Little Bookie. Mortimer Adler started strangling the snake of positivism almost in his cradle. He grew up in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in uptown Manhattan (his father was a jewelry salesman, his mother an ex-schoolteacher). He often told his playmates: "Go away. I'm thinking," and shut the door of his room on them. He was a prolific writer (to get one short story published, he mimeographed his own newspaper, which lasted for two issues). He thought he might become a poet. Sample effort: "Girls are funny creatures / Though some have pretty features / And with their whims...
...Later, Adler sent her long, peremptory reading lists ("Go to some library and get John Morley's essay, 'On Compromise.' Don't put this off. Get it somehow. Buy it in a bookstore if necessary. I'll go halves with you . . . Which reminds me that you ought to read the New Testament this summer...