Great Books and Great Ideas

Recently I came across a book by Mortimer J. Adler: 'How To Think About The Great Ideas' (edited by Max Weismann, Open Court, 6th edition, 2003). It is in fact a collection of 52 TV interviews given by the philosopher Adler (1902 - 198?), whose name is always associated with The Great Books, The Great Ideas, and the University of Chicago.

It has been a wide known fact that Adler, together with the then university president Robert Maynard Hutchins, introduced a compulsory reading scheme to the students of the University of Chicago, asking each and every undergrad to read some classics to enhance their liberal education. What I didn't know is that Adler et al had encountered so much opposition, not only from the students, but also from their peers there.

In one of the 52 episodes of this TV series, Adler advised the viewers on "How to Think about Learning". In this episode, Adler states very clearly that 'the student's interests should not govern learning', a concept which ran contrary to most educationists and philosophers. Adler thinks that the child-centered schools have a misconception: they believe that the child comes to school with certain interests and we (the educators) ought to take those intersts as dictating to us what the child should learn and what the child should be taught.

In fact, Adler says that it is up to the teachers and the educators to decide what should be taught. And then having decided what the student should learn, their duty, their task, is to arouse a deep and lively interest in the very things that should be learned. "If there are certain things fundamental to human life, if there is a body of wisdom which all persons should have, if there are certain kinds ofknowledge, certain arts that all persons should acquire, then they should be in the possession of all, regardless of their individual differences, regardless of what their talents or their interests may be."

I guess this is the cornerstone of his ideas of The Great Books, which Adler believes everyone of us should read, young or old, child or adult, in our life time.

OK, I shall start such reading scheme now, in this Year of the Dog (2006), 'cause I was born in a Year of the Dog many decades before. Would I be finishing the entire Great Books collection by the next Year of the Dog (2018) ?

I don't know, but I'd certainly hope to have finished at least half of them by then.