Crisis in Education

The Crisis in Education

Mortimer J. Adler described a crisis as a turning point — the moment at which a situation must change for better or worse. In his view, American education had reached such a point. Progressive education had begun as a necessary reaction against the rigidity, formalism and narrowness of an older classical system, but Adler believed that the reaction had gone too far. The challenge was therefore not to return to the past, but to find a more balanced approach that retained what was valuable in both traditions.

For Adler, the answer lay in combining the best elements of classical and progressive education. From the classical tradition came intellectual discipline, respect for inherited knowledge and the cultivation of reason. From progressive education came an emphasis on active learning, experience and the relevance of education to contemporary life. A living culture, Adler argued, needs both tradition and invention: without invention it becomes stagnant, but without tradition each generation is forced to begin again from nothing.

The Hutchins Program

Adler associated this middle position with the educational reforms advocated by Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago. The aim was not authoritarian discipline or a return to rote learning, as critics sometimes suggested, but the development of independent minds through reasoned study. Liberal education, in this view, should not tell students what to think; it should give them the intellectual tools required to read carefully, write clearly, speak intelligently and think critically.

The program also rejected the idea that students should simply choose whatever subjects happen to interest them at a particular moment. Education has responsibilities beyond satisfying immediate preferences. A young person cannot yet know all the things he or she will need in order to live intelligently, participate in society and understand the world. The teacher therefore has a role not merely as a provider of information, but as a guide into disciplines, ideas and traditions that students might never discover on their own.

Progress — but Not in Everything

One of Adler’s principal objections to progressive education was what he called the myth of universal progress: the assumption that because knowledge advances in certain fields, everything newer must necessarily be better than everything older. Scientific knowledge undeniably develops as new observations, experiments and discoveries are made, but Adler argued that this does not mean that human nature, moral questions or philosophical problems are continually replaced by newer and better versions.

Human beings still confront questions that were familiar to Plato and Aristotle: What is justice? What is happiness? What makes a good society? What is knowledge? What are our responsibilities to one another? Technology changes rapidly, but these underlying human questions remain remarkably persistent. For that reason, Adler believed that older philosophical and literary works can remain as relevant to modern readers as they were to their original audiences.

Science and Philosophy

Adler drew a strong distinction between science and philosophy. Science progresses because it continually acquires new data about the observable world. Its conclusions can be revised when better evidence becomes available, and this continual correction is one of its great strengths. Philosophy, by contrast, deals with more permanent questions about knowledge, reality, morality and human purpose. It develops not primarily through new experiments, but through deeper reflection, clearer concepts and better arguments.

This distinction also affected Adler’s understanding of usefulness. Science and technology provide us with increasingly powerful means of changing the world, but they do not by themselves tell us what ends those means should serve. The ability to do something does not answer the question of whether we ought to do it. Adler therefore argued that scientific power must be accompanied by moral and philosophical wisdom — a principle that has perhaps become even more relevant as technology has grown more powerful.

What Is a Human Being?

The second great issue underlying Adler’s educational philosophy concerned the nature of the human person. He strongly opposed theories that reduced human behaviour entirely to conditioning, instinct or biological adaptation. Human beings certainly share many characteristics with other animals, but Adler believed that our capacity for abstract thought, language, reasoning, judgement and deliberate choice makes education fundamentally different from mere training.

If human beings are rational animals, education must cultivate those rational capacities. It should help students learn not simply to react effectively to their environment, but to examine ideas, weigh evidence, form judgements and communicate their conclusions. The purpose of liberal education is therefore not merely adjustment to society or preparation for employment; it is the development of the intellectual powers that make independent human judgement possible.

The Liberal Arts

For Adler, the foundation of such education was the traditional liberal arts: reading and listening, writing and speaking, together with the thinking required by all four. These are not simply school subjects to be completed and forgotten. They are intellectual skills used throughout life. A person learns to read well only by reading demanding works, learns to write by writing, and learns to reason by repeatedly confronting questions that require careful thought.

This was also Adler’s answer to an important weakness he saw in older classical education. Formal disciplines cannot be learned merely by studying grammar, logic or abstract rules. The arts of communication and thought must be acquired through practice. Students need both the principles of good reasoning and repeated opportunities to apply them to serious subject matter.

Why the Great Books?

The intellectual skills of liberal education require something worth reading, discussing and thinking about. Here Adler turned to the Great Books — works of philosophy, science, history and literature that have continued to challenge readers over many generations. Their importance does not lie simply in their age or prestige, but in the fact that they address questions of lasting human significance and reward repeated reading.

To read Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne or other major writers is not an antiquarian exercise. We read them because the problems they explore remain with us. They may contain scientific errors or assumptions belonging to their own times, but that does not eliminate the philosophical, moral or imaginative insights they offer. The purpose is not to treat the past as infallible, but to enter into a conversation with minds different from our own.

General Education Before Specialization

Adler believed that education should distinguish clearly between general education and specialized training. Before someone becomes a physician, lawyer, scientist, historian or engineer, that person should first acquire the intellectual foundations required of any educated human being. Specialized knowledge may prepare us for a profession; liberal education prepares us to think and communicate beyond the boundaries of that profession.

In his ideal educational structure, the early years would establish basic competence in language, mathematics and imagination; a later stage would concentrate on liberal education through the arts of learning and the study of major works; only then would advanced professional and specialized training dominate. Specialization is necessary, but it should rest upon a broader intellectual foundation rather than replace it.

Against Predigested Learning

Adler was particularly critical of an education based almost entirely on textbooks and lectures. Textbooks often present knowledge in a simplified, predigested form, while lectures can encourage passive reception rather than active thought. Students may accumulate information without developing the ability to examine a difficult text, construct an argument or distinguish between evidence and opinion.

His preferred alternative was a combination of careful reading and Socratic discussion. Students should encounter important works directly and then be questioned about what they have read. What does the author mean? Is the argument sound? What evidence supports it? How does it compare with another view? Such discussion turns the classroom from a place where conclusions are delivered into one where understanding is actively developed.

The Teacher as Guide

In this approach, the teacher is neither an authoritarian lecturer nor merely a facilitator of whatever students happen to wish to discuss. The teacher must know the material, understand the intellectual skills involved and be capable of asking questions that lead students towards clearer thinking. Teaching is therefore an art — not the transmission of ready-made opinions, but the disciplined assistance of another mind in learning how to think for itself.

Adler consequently placed high demands on teachers themselves. A teacher should be more than a specialist in one narrow field. He or she should be widely read, intellectually curious and capable of representing the broader cultural and intellectual tradition to students. Teachers cannot cultivate habits of serious reading and thought in others if those habits have never been developed in themselves.

Education and Democracy

For Adler, the stakes were ultimately political as well as educational. A democracy depends upon citizens who can read, listen, question arguments and make independent judgements. If education fails to cultivate these abilities, public life becomes increasingly vulnerable to slogans, propaganda, demagoguery and the pressure of majority opinion. Freedom requires more than the absence of restraint; it requires minds capable of using freedom intelligently.

That is why Adler considered liberal education fundamentally democratic. He rejected the idea that serious intellectual education should be reserved for a small elite. The ability to reason, communicate and engage with important ideas belongs to everyone. Equality in education should therefore mean not merely equal time in school, but genuine access to the kind of education that develops independent judgement.

Reform Without Returning to the Past

Adler did not advocate restoring an old classical curriculum unchanged. He recognised that traditional education had become rigid, excessively formal and disconnected from active learning. But he also believed that progressive reform had sometimes discarded valuable intellectual disciplines along with the abuses it sought to eliminate. The solution was neither nostalgia nor educational fashion, but a deliberate synthesis of what was strongest in both traditions.

Tradition without renewal becomes dead; innovation without tradition loses its foundations. Education must therefore transmit what earlier generations have learned while preparing students to question, develop and sometimes overturn that inheritance. A culture remains alive only when memory and invention work together.

Education as Liberation

Behind Adler’s arguments lies a conception of education that reaches far beyond schools, examinations and qualifications. Liberal education is ultimately a form of liberation: liberation from ignorance, from unexamined opinion and from intellectual dependence upon others. Discipline and freedom are not opposites in this view. Intellectual discipline is precisely what makes genuine independence possible.

That is why learning to read a difficult book, follow an argument, express an idea clearly and reconsider one’s own assumptions matters so much. These are not merely academic exercises. They are ways of becoming more capable of understanding the world and of deciding for ourselves how we should live within it.

A Continuing Educational Challenge

Adler wrote in the context of educational controversies of his own time, and some of his language and criticisms inevitably belong to that period. Yet the central questions remain remarkably familiar. How much should education prepare students for employment, and how much should it cultivate them as human beings? How do we balance specialist knowledge with general understanding? How can schools encourage independent thought rather than passive absorption of information?

Perhaps his most enduring answer is also the simplest: teach people how to read, how to think, how to communicate and how to continue learning for themselves. Curricula, technologies and educational fashions will continue to change, but those abilities remain at the heart of an educated life.

The purpose of education is not simply to fill the mind with information, but to develop a mind capable of continuing its own education.

Source

• Adapted and substantially condensed from Mortimer J. Adler’s writings on educational reform, liberal education, the Great Books and the educational philosophy associated with Robert Maynard Hutchins. Historical polemics and strongly time-specific passages have been shortened or reframed while preserving the central argument.
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