Word: adler
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...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...
...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...