M. Adler’s speech

Mortimer J. Adler — A Lifetime of Learning

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) devoted much of his long life to one central idea: education should not end when schooling ends. Speaking at Harvard Extension School, he reflected on his own unusual education and on the importance of continuing to read, question and discuss throughout adult life. For Adler, becoming truly educated was not something that could be certified by a diploma. It was a lifelong process, nourished by books, experience and conversation.

His own path to education was anything but conventional. Adler left high school because he wanted to become a journalist and went to work for the New York Sun. Realising that two years of high school might not be quite enough, he enrolled in extension courses at Columbia University. There, while studying Victorian literature, he encountered John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and was astonished to discover how widely Mill had read as a child. Adler, then fifteen, decided that he had some catching up to do.

The Discovery of the Great Books

Adler began by buying Plato, an encounter that changed the direction of his life. He became fascinated by the Socratic method — the idea that understanding develops through questioning, argument and dialogue rather than simply memorising information. His abilities were noticed by Frank Allen Patterson, director of Columbia’s extension programme, who helped him obtain a scholarship to study at Columbia.

Adler later recalled with characteristic humour that he failed to receive his bachelor’s degree at the expected time. The often-repeated story was that he could not swim, but Adler explained that the real problem was his refusal to attend compulsory physical education. With a logic class at nine and philosophy at eleven, changing into gym clothes at ten simply seemed to him an unnecessary interruption. Columbia eventually relented — although it took sixty years before he received an honorary bachelor’s degree.

Schooling Is Not the Same as Education

At the centre of Adler’s educational philosophy was an important distinction between schooling and learning. Schooling has beginnings and endings: elementary school, university, professional education and extension courses can all be completed. Diplomas, degrees and certificates mark those moments. Genuine adult learning, however, has no graduation day. In Adler’s memorable formulation, it ends only with the death certificate.

He believed schooling should fulfil several purposes. It should prepare people to earn a living, enable them to participate intelligently as citizens and give them the intellectual tools required to live thoughtful and morally responsible lives. But the last of these could never be completed in youth. Experience and maturity were indispensable. Schools and universities therefore succeeded not when they produced supposedly “finished” educated people, but when they produced adults with the ability and desire to continue learning for themselves.

Adult Learning Is Interminable

For Adler, the notion that someone of thirty, forty or fifty could announce that his education was complete was almost absurd. His response was essentially: if your education is finished, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Adult learning, once begun, is interminable. Unlike much of the body, the mind need not simply decline after youth; properly nourished and exercised, it can continue developing throughout life.

And Adler was very clear about how the mind should be nourished: through reading, questioning and discussion. Books provide ideas, but merely accumulating information is not enough. Understanding grows when those ideas are examined, challenged and discussed with others. Education in this deeper sense is therefore not passive consumption of knowledge but an activity of the mind itself.

The Great Books and the Great Ideas

Adler’s own intellectual life was transformed at Columbia when he encountered the Great Books seminars developed by John Erskine. Beginning in the 1920s, Adler taught such seminars with the poet Mark Van Doren and discovered something that remained fundamental to his thinking: a truly great book is never completely exhausted by a first reading. Returning to Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare or other great writers years later could reveal ideas that an earlier reading had failed to disclose.

He continued this approach at the University of Chicago, where he conducted Great Books seminars with university president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Later he became closely involved with Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopaedia Britannica and helped create the Syntopicon, an ambitious index organised around the great ideas and questions that recur throughout Western intellectual history.

Why Read the Great Books?

Adler believed that great books deserve the name not simply because they are old or famous, but because they are inexhaustibly rereadable. They confront questions that human beings continue to ask: What is justice? What is truth? What constitutes happiness? How should society be organised? What can we know? What makes a good life? Such questions do not disappear when fashions, technologies or political systems change.

Reading these works therefore becomes more than an exercise in acquiring historical knowledge. The reader enters a conversation extending across centuries. Each generation approaches the same books with different experiences and questions, and each individual reader discovers that a book encountered at twenty may become an entirely different book when read again at sixty or eighty.

Becoming an Autodidact

Once formal schooling is completed, Adler argued, genuine adult education necessarily becomes largely the work of the autodidact — the self-directed learner. Teachers and institutions may help, but ultimately understanding cannot simply be transferred from one mind to another. Like Socrates acting as an intellectual midwife, a good teacher can question, challenge and encourage; the actual act of understanding must take place within the learner’s own mind.

In his A Guidebook to Learning (1986), Adler identified three especially important areas for lifelong general education: history, philosophy and imaginative literature. History matters because everything has a history; philosophy because its fundamental questions are everybody’s business; and literature because novels, drama and poetry allow us to encounter human experience through the imagination.

Read — and Discuss

Adler reduced his practical advice for lifelong learners to two wonderfully simple words: Read and Discuss. Reading alone is valuable, but discussion forces us to explain what we think we have understood, listen to alternative interpretations and reconsider our assumptions. Conversely, discussion without serious reading can easily deteriorate into little more than an exchange of opinions and prejudices.

He expressed the point with typical wit: “Solitary reading is as horrible as solitary drinking.” Behind the humour was a serious conviction. Books become intellectually most fruitful when they provoke conversation. Reading and discussion together exercise the mind in a way that neither can entirely accomplish alone.

The Mind Can Continue to Grow

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Adler’s philosophy is his rejection of the idea that education belongs primarily to the young. He believed that maturity can actually make adults better learners. With increasing experience comes a greater capacity to relate ideas in books to life itself. A young reader may understand the words of a great author; decades later, experience may allow that same reader to understand their meaning at a much deeper level.

This makes reading throughout life something more than a pleasant pastime. It becomes part of the continuing development of the person. We do not read simply to know more; at our best, we read in order to understand more. And because understanding can continue to deepen for as long as the mind remains curious, there is no age at which learning needs to stop.

A Lifetime of Learning

Adler’s message is ultimately both simple and demanding. Formal education may finish, professional training may finish and courses may finish — but education in its fullest sense should not. The great books remain available to be opened again, reconsidered and discussed, while experience continually changes the reader who returns to them.

A lifetime of learning therefore has no final examination and no diploma. Its reward is the gradual enlargement of the mind itself. For anyone who loves books, that is perhaps one of the best reasons to keep a library close at hand — and to keep reading for as long as possible.

Source

Adapted and condensed from Mortimer J. Adler’s address on lifelong learning at Harvard Extension School and from ideas developed throughout his writings on education, the Great Books and adult learning.