Word: paideia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...word essays defining the 102 Great Ideas that constitute the heart of a prodigious index to the Great Books. In addition, he started and still directs the Institute for Philosophical Research, which is devoted to publishing learned tracts. He passionately pushes his Paideia program, an experimental educational system that is imbuing selected elementary and high schools in Atlanta, Oakland and Chicago with a rigorous curriculum taught in part by the Socratic method. Adler's prescription for such sustained productivity: "I take almost no exercise, and I work harder every year than the year before...
...approach that concentrated on teaching and learning was the main contribution of my book The Paideia Proposal. The favorable response that the program elicited focused on its recommendation of three distinct types of teaching and learning that must be operative throughout the twelve years of basic schooling. These methods are in contrast to the one kind of teaching that now dominates the scene, which is didactic instruction by lectures and textbooks...
...board of editors for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the author of 30 books. His newest: How to Speak / How to Listen. With Educator Robert Maynard Hutchins, he compiled the Great Books of the Western World, 54 volumes of the world's classics. Last year he published The Paideia Proposal, a manifesto to reform U.S. primary and secondary education by instituting a standard and much more demanding curriculum. When he led the procession to Columbia College's commencement last week, however, the scholar was not there to give the main address. Mortimer Adler, still formidably active...
...took a Paideia seminar with Mortimer Adler last spring. Rather than a "first among equals," he was a bombastic drill sergeant, more devoted to playing "Guess My Interpretation" than to the discussion and evaluation of student ideas...