INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Friday, November 27, 1998

EDUCATOR MORTIMER ADLER: How He Brought The World's Greatest Thinkers To The Lay Reader *

Want to improve your thinking? Study works that have proved their merit over time, suggests educator Mortimer Adler.

Thinking of Brian Tracy? Think back. Napoleon-Hill? Back further. Consider Aristotle, recommends Adler, retired chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. and author of "Aristotle for Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Easy."

Adler, 95, has spent a lifetime making philosophy's greatest texts accessible for the lay reader. While teaching at the University of Chicago (1930-52), he helped develop the Great Books program and edit the 54-volume set Great Books of the Western World.

But he didn't stop there. In his quest to help people equip themselves to think clearly, he made sure he offered them the rudiments of how to study. His 1940 surprise best seller, "How To Read a Book," remains one of the great "how to" books to this day.

Adler is "the most important intellectual counselor and - guide American culture has had since World War II," said Josiah Bunting, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute.

Bunting, who draws on Adler's ideas for his new book, "An Education for Our Time," points out that "whenever there's a discussion of a core curriculum anywhere, that is Adler's influence.... (His) whole focus . . . was on preparing people to be keenly intelligent laymen who would be self-educating for the rest of their lives."

As Adler has written, "No one can be fully educated in school, no matter how long the schooling or how good it is."

To learn well from books, Adler says, the first lesson to master is active reading.

Learn to read as actively as you write, he advises. "Passive reading, which is almost always with the eyes in motion but with the mind not engaged, is not reading at all," he wrote.

If you want a measure of truly active reading, consider how you read a love letter, he says.

People in love "read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole," he wrote in "How To Read a Book."

"They grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences," he wrote.

The best way, he says, to make sure you are "incessantly active- while reading, is by making notes, page by page as you read-not in bed or in an armchair but at a table or a desk."

The New York native was one of the first educators to recommend readers underline and write in the margins.

"Reading, if it is active, is thinking," he wrote. "And thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written"--hence the summarizing in the margins. "The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it, usually does not know what he thinks."

Besides aiding the memory, jotting notes helps you become more fully aware of your own thoughts about what you're reading.

Adler recommends starting a book with careful consideration of the title and the table of contents. A few minutes spent ensuring you have the right context is key to comprehension.

Consider Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Adler conducted a survey of 25 well-read people and found that most assumed the book-dealt with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. In fact, it starts at the height of Rome's power. That misconception alone is enough to distort the reader's study of the entire book, he says.

Adler suggests you become an active listener as well as an active reader. Both abilities involve skillful note-taking. Pay careful attention to the introduction of a speech, as you would to a book's title and table of contents.

Also pay attention to special terms, and take note of the assumptions, logic and evidence conveyed. Finally, as you would with a book, analyze whether the argument builds a case for the conclusion.

Adler knows the value of self-education. The son of an immigrant jewelry salesman in New York, Adler dropped out of school at 14 and went to work as a copy boy at the New York Sun, hoping to become a journalist.

After a year, he took night classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. He became interested in the great philosophers after reading the autobiography of English philosopher John Stuart Mill.

It was a sense of shame that spurred him. Mill had read Plato when he was 5. Adler had never read him at all. A neighbor lent him a book by Plato, and Adler became hooked, deciding to study philosophy at Columbia University, where he received a scholarship.

He was so focused on philosophy that he failed to complete the requisite gym course to earn his bachelor's degree. No matter. His command of the classics became so great that Columbia awarded him a Ph.D. a few years after he began teaching there. Throughout his teaching career, Adler remained devoted to helping those outside academia educate themselves further.

Forty-three years after "How To Read a Book" came out, Adler wrote "How To Speak/ How To Listen."

Whether trying to sell a product or making a grand political speech, he recommends keeping three elements from Aristotle's "Rhetoric" in mind.

Establish your credibility with audience members, grab hold of their emotions and then present your facts and figures. Without the emotional grip, you won't be able to keep your listeners' attention, he's found.

Adler, who's been teaching business leaders the classics at the Aspen Institute for more than 40 years, suggests that "to grow younger with the years, work harder as you get older."

Indeed, Adler has written more than 20 books since he turned 70, and is working on his 60th book, "The New Technology: Servant or Master?"

"The loss of immediate or short-term memories that inevitably accompanies advancing years ... in no way diminishes the power of creative, analytic, and reflective thought," Adler wrote in his second autobiography, "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror" (1992).

With a healthy brain, "Our power to think reflectively and analytically never diminishes, and on the contrary, appears to increase with age," he wrote.

* By John Berlau, Investor's Business Daily Friday, November 27, 1998

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