Word: adler
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...book is called simply "How to Read a Book," and it is by a professor at Harvard's great intellectual rival, the University of Chicago. The author is Mortimer J. Adler, associate professor of Law at Chicago, and right-hand man of President Robert M. Hutchins...
Mortimer Jerome Adler never graduated from high school. He never got a B.A. degree. In 1917, when he was 15, he quit high school in Manhattan because the principal had taken pardonable annoyance at Adler's efforts to run the school as well as the school paper. After two years on the New York Sun, Adler went to Columbia, finished the four-year course in three as top man in his class. At that time a graduate of Columbia had to be able to swim. Adler neither swam nor learned to swim. He got no degree until...
When President Robert Hutchins brought him to the University of Chicago in 1930, Mortimer Adler was a very, very bright young man of 28. At first Hutchins put him in the Philosophy faculty, where his colleagues soon proved ungrateful for his presence. He then went to the Law faculty. As associate professor of Law and co-teacher with Hutchins of the famous course in Philosophy of Education (reading and discussion of great books), as a writer of philosophic essays respectful of St. Thomas Aquinas, Adler became one of the most scintillating, least adored, thinkers...
Long-nosed, lustrous Professor Adler wrote it in 16 days last summer, a chapter a day. (Each night he went to a movie, taking in 16 movies.) It is not a slight book (371 pages), but it is the first of Adler's writings in which he has spoken expressly to the man in the street. For people who think they know how to read, he has a clarifying question: "What things would you do by yourself if your life depended on understanding something readable which at first perusal left you somewhat in the dark?" After pondering that...
This sensible thesis is given by Adler with almost stainless clarity and with only an occasional glitter of that acerbity by which dull students at Chicago remember him. Adler admits that he has an ulterior motive: to appeal over the heads of conventional and progressive educators to the great reading public, to, show them what education might be and" is not. Putting first things first, competence in reading is a prerequisite to understanding nine-tenths of what men have known...