Max,

To explain what I am doing with the Great Ideas in Boulder, Colorado, I would like to give you a little history followed by what it is.

In 1987 I bought a used, but like new, 54-volume set of Great Books of the Western World for my 44th birthday. In opening some of the books that creaked because they had never been opened, I realized the immenseness of this collection, and that if I was going to gain anything, I was going to have to "eat one bite of the elephant at a time." I started reading, and soon concluded that I needed to discuss the readings with others to get a better understanding.

I joined a Great Books Reading and Discussion group at a Denver library and attended every other week until 1993, when I moved to Boulder. I immediately joined the Great Books group that met every other Tuesday at the suburban Meadows library, and quickly became interested in doing more. A couple of us formed what we called the small reading group that met on the off Tuesdays to read and discuss selections from the Great Books Ten Years of Reading List. In 1997 a problem started to crop up. Some participants from both the large and small groups wanted to read long reading selections from the Great Books and other contemporary books, and I thought short reading selections were better. The understanding of what the author was trying to say and the depth of discussion was better with short selections. The problem began to crystallize in my mind. While with short selections understanding was better, it was not good. Many great ideas were covered in each Great Books reading, but it seemed like no one was gaining a good understanding of any of the ideas, not to go into the problem of endless diversions off the subject. So I split.

What I began in September 1998 was a video, reading and discussion group at the main library on every other Thursday night. For the first session each month we have read about the one selected great idea from the Syntopicon or from Mortimer Adler's book Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (7-10 pages). Then from 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. we watch a video from "Retrospective of Mortimer Alder's Television Series, The Great Ideas," use a list of prepared questions and discuss the video and reading selection. For the second session we have read about the same great idea from Great Treasury of Western Thought, A Compendium of Important Statements by the Great Thinkers in Western History (10-15 pages), watch another Adler video, if available, and proceed with more questions.

Here comes the good part. At the end of the two sessions on one idea we have a much better understanding of that great idea. You see improvement after a while. I would go so far as to say we have a good understanding.

There is also very little getting off the subject. This is accomplished by starting the video immediately and at the end of the video asking a question immediately. Then many more questions are asked by me, the facilitator. There is no time for extraneous discussion.

I think I have designed something that is good. It is successful because of the content and clarity of the video as well as the reading selections. Thank you, Mortimer Adler. My job is easy. The hard stuff, the identifying of the big issues from ancient to modern times and the often conflicting answers, has been done by Mortimer. Like they say in a television ad, "Is this stuff good, or what?"

Testimonials by Discussion Group Members

I have never read the great books selections before. I really enjoy the great ideas. I like being able to focus solely on one great idea, and reading what the great authors had to say about it. It allows you to delve deeply into one subject. It is helpful to me to read the reading selection and then watch the video. The video further clarifies any questions I had, or clears up things I didn't understand. The two in combination make it more meaningful.
--Pam Hansen

I am 72 years old and have been interested in the Great Books for many years. The Great Ideas group in Boulder, led by Brian Hansen, has been for me an effective and stimulating platform for the discussion of one great idea. Mortimer Adler's video, the printed material and the facilitators firm but flexible approach, all contribute to a rewarding experience.
--Neil Magee

Best regards,

Brian Hansen

Dear Max,

Shame on me for procrastination. I started this in regard to #68, and set it aside until I received # 69.

The tragedy, as I see it, is that what Robert Hutchins wrote is more valid today than when he wrote it. Today it seems as though "educators" and politicians don't believe our schools are fulfilling their responsibilities unless they introduce preschoolers to computers. The great push is still towards "relevancy". I am always reminded of Ecclesiastes 1:9-11,

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. 10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

I believe it was Hegel who said something to the effect that the only thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

Also, I often think of the concluding line in the folk song, "Blowin in the Wind", "When will they ever learn."

Sincerely,

Dan Krudop

Dear Max,

This evening's discussion more than satisfied the goal you gave -- wanting people to think about what people are doing. For the most part, the group asked the questions I had listed. It went quite well on its own, although I added some here and there. It was fascinating to watch the twists and turns it made, always coming back to the text. We talked about The Great Ideas Seminar Guidelines (I distributed) at the onset, so people held to it pretty well.

Towards the end the discussion was in the direction that people were in control of their own happiness; that luck was what you made yourself of your circumstances. I had found the following question in the archive of your seminar, and ended the discussion with it (as food for thought only, no answers were given):

"The notion that virtue is its own reward is a crucial issue. If morally virtuous persons can live well and become happy in spite of dire poverty; in spite of being enslaved; in spite of being compelled by circumstances to lead two- or three-part lives, with insufficient time for leisure; in spite of an unhealthy environment; in spite of being disfranchised and treated as nonparticipating subjects of government rather than as citizens with a voice in their own government, then wouldn't the social, political, and economic reforms that eliminate these conditions and replace them with better ones, make little or no contribution to human happiness?"

I could immediately see the thoughts that this triggered. Everyone left with great enthusiasm, still thinking.

...

I am bringing a copy of Dr. Adler's How to Read a Book to my son's (8th grade) teacher who, in addition to teaching science, teaches the "study skills" class. Skills (I'm aware of) being taught include organizational skills, spelling skills, ... but not reading skills. She was, however, quite interested in the idea of the discussion group, so I will bring her one of the videos as well.

That's all at this time. At some point, I will quit being a computer programmer and get paid as a teacher. But I feel I've taken the first steps towards breaking my old habits and starting some new ones, which means (I think), according to Dewey, that the end is in sight.

Regards,

Janet Miller

Max:

I read the notice in the last Online about the new How to Think about the Great Ideas coming out in the Spring 2000 in paperback with pre-publication copies available to members. Would certainly be interested in receiving a copy of the paperback. Am starting the Group Discussion on the Great Ideas in a few weeks based on Adler's book, as I told you before and really looking forward to it. Hope to continue in the future with the new book. Let me know when it might be available. Thanks.

Teddy Handfield

THE AIMS OF EDUCATION
by Robert M. Hutchins

Part III [continued from previous issue]

If, then, we are to have standards of social criticism and social action, and if they are to be anything but emotional standards, they must result from philosophical and historical study and from the habit of straight thinking therein. It would be a wonderful thing if we were all so conditioned that our reflexes worked unanimously in the right direction when confronted by political and economic injustice, if we could be trained in infancy to recognize and fight it. But even if we could arrive at adolescence in this happy state I am afraid that our excellent habits might fall away under pressure. Something is needed to preserve them, and this is understanding. This is another way of saying that the intellect commands the will. Our parents should make every effort in our childhood to moderate our passions and to habituate us to justice and prudence. But the role of higher education in this connection must be to supply the firm and enduring groundwork to sustain these habits when the tumult of adult life beats upon them.

It seems obvious to me, therefore, that the kind of education I have been urging is the kind that helps to develop a social consciousness and a social conscience. Why isn't it obvious to everybody else? The first reason, I think, is the popularity of the cult of skepticism. I have been saying that I want to give the student knowledge about society. But we have got ourselves into such a state of mind that if anybody outside of natural science says he knows anything, he is a dogmatist and an authoritarian. Anybody who says, "I don't know because nobody can"; or, "Everything is a matter of opinion"; or, "I will take no position because I am tolerant and open-minded" is a liberal, progressive, democratic fellow to whom the fate of the world may safely be entrusted.

I regret that I am forced to remind you that the two most eminent skeptics of modern times were among its most stalwart reactionaries. Hume was a Tory of the deepest dye, and Montaigne was, too. This was a perfectly natural consequence of their philosophical position. Montaigne held, in effect that "there was nothing more dangerous than to touch a political order once it had been established. For who knows whether the next will be better? The world is living by custom and tradition; we should not disturb it on the strength of private opinions which express little more than our own moods and humors, or, at the utmost the local prejudices of our own country." The decision to which the skepticism of Hume and Montaigne led them was the decision to let the world alone. There is another decision to which they could have come and at which others of their faith have actually arrived. If we can know nothing about society, if we can have only opinion about it, and if one man's opinion is as good as another's, then we may decide to get what we irrationally want by the use of irrational means, namely force. The appeal to reason is vain in a skeptical world. That appeal can only be successful if those appealed to have some rational views of the society of which they are a part.

A second reason why some people doubt the social utility of the education I favor is that they belong to the cult of immediacy, or of what may be called presentism. In this view the way to comprehend the world is to grapple with the reality you find about you. You tour the stockyards and the steel plants and understand the industrial system. There is no past. Any reference to antiquity or the Middle Ages shows that you are not interested in social progress. Philosophy is merely a function of its time and place. We live in a different time and usually a different place. Hence philosophers who lived yesterday have nothing to say to us today.

But we cannot understand the environment by looking at it. It presents itself to us as a mass of incomprehensible items. Simply collecting these items does not enlighten us. It may lead only to that worship of information which, according to John Dewey, still curses the social studies, and understanding escapes us still. We attack old problems not knowing they are old and make the same mistakes because we do not know they were made. So Stuart Chase and Thurman Arnold some years ago renewed the mediaeval controversy between the nominalists and the realists without showing that they realized that the subject had ever been discussed before or that they had the knowledge or training to conduct the discussion to any intelligible end.

The method of disposing of philosophy by placing it in a certain time and then saying that time is gone has been adequately dealt with by a contemporary historian. He says, "It ascribes the birth of Aristotelianism to the fact that Aristotle was a Greek and a pagan, living in a society based on slavery, four centuries before Christ; it also explains the revival of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century by the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian, a Christian, and even a monk, living in a feudal society, whose political and economic structure was widely different from that of the fourth-century Greece; and it accounts equally well for the Aristotelianism of J. Maritain, who is French, a layman, and living in the 'bourgeois' society of a nineteenth-century republic. Conversely, since they were living in the same times and the same places, just as Aristotle should have held the same philosophy as Plato, so Abelard and St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes and Gassendi, all these men, who flatly contradicted one another, should have said more or less the same things."

You will see at once that skepticism and presentism are related to a third 'ism' that distorts our view of the method of education for social improvement. This is the cult of scientism, a cult to which, curiously enough, very few natural scientists belong. It is a cult composed of those who misconceive the nature or the role of science. They say that science is modern; science is tentative; science is progressive. Everything which is not science is antiquated, or at best irrelevant. A writer in so respectable and learned a publication as the International Journal of Ethics has called upon us to follow science in our quest for the good life, and the fact that he is a philosopher suggests that the cult of scientism has found members in the most unlikely places. For it must be clear that though we can and should use science to achieve social improvement, we cannot follow it to this destination. The reason is that science does not tell us where to go. Men may employ it for good or evil purposes; but it is the men that have the purposes, and they do not learn them from their scientific studies.

Scientism is a disservice to science. The rise of science is the most important fact of modern life. No student should be permitted to complete his education without understanding it. Universities should and must support and encourage scientific research. From a scientific education we may expect an understanding of science. From scientific investigation we may expect scientific knowledge. We are confusing the issue and demanding what we have no right to ask if we seek to learn from science the goals of human life and of organized society.

Finally, we have the cult of anti-intellectualism, which has some oddly assorted members. They range from Hitler, who thinks with his red corpuscles, through the members of the three other cults, to men of good will, who, since they are men of good will, are at the opposite pole to Hitler, but can give no rational justification for being there. They hold that philosophy of the heart which Auguste Comte first celebrated. Comte belonged to the cult of scientism. Therefore he could know nothing but what science told him. But he wanted social improvement. Hence he tried to make a philosophy and finally a religion out of science, and succeeded only in producing something which was no one of the three and which was, in fact, little more than sentimentalism.

Sentimentalism is an irrational desire to be helpful to one's fellow-men. It sometimes appears as an ingratiating and even a redeeming quality in those who cannot or will not think. But the sentimentalist is really a dangerous character. He distrusts the intellect, because it might show him he is wrong. He believes in the primacy of the will, and this is what makes him dangerous. You don't know what you ought to want; you don't know why you want what you want. But you do know that you want it. This easily develops into the notion that since you want it, you ought to have it. You are a man of good will, and your opponents by definition are not. Since you ought to have what you want, you should get it if you have the power; and here the journey from the man of good will to Hitler is complete.

This is indeed the position in which the members of all four cults -- skepticism, presentism, scientism, and anti-intellectualism -- find themselves on questions of social improvement. Since they cannot know, they must feel. We can only hope that they will feel good. But we cannot be very hopeful. Where does the good will come from? Long ago the campaign before the Austrian plebiscite gave us the news for the first time that Hitler was guided by a special revelation. Most other men of good will do not claim such intimate contact with the Deity. But they are uniformly mysterious about the source of their inspiration. If it is not knowledge, and hence in this case philosophy, it must be habit--habit of the most irrational kind. A university can have nothing to do with irrational habits, except to try to moderate the bad ones and support the good ones. But if by hypothesis we cannot do this by rational means, we are forced to the conclusion that a university must be a large nursery school tenderly preserving good habits from shock, in the hope that if they can be nursed long enough they will last through life, though without any rational foundation. In this view the boarding-school in the country would be the only proper training ground for American youth, and the University of Chicago could take no part in social improvement. In fact, it would be a subversive institution.

It hardly helps us here to say, as many anti-intellectuals do, that education must educate "the whole man." Of all the meaningless phrases in educational discussion this is the prize. Does it mean that education must do the whole job of translating the whole infant into a whole adult? Must it do what the church, the family, the state, the YMCA, and the Boy Scouts allege they are trying to do? If so, what is the place of these important or interesting organizations, and what becomes of that intellectual training which educational institutions might be able to give if they could get around to it? Are we compelled to assume that our students can learn nothing from life or that they have led no life before coming to us and lead none after they come? Moreover, what we are seeking is a guide to the emphasis that higher education must receive. Talk of the whole man seems to imply that there should be no emphasis at all. All "parts" of the man are of equal importance: his dress, his food, his health, his family, his business. Is education to emphasize them all? That would be like saying, if we were going to study the war, that in studying it we should emphasize the war. A flat equality among subjects, interests, and powers will hardly lead to the satisfactory development of any. Is it too much to say that if we can teach our students to lead the life of reason we shall do all that can be expected of us and do at the same time the best thing that can be done for the whole man? The task of education is to make rational animals more perfectly rational.

We see, then, that the quest for social improvement is a perpetual one. Men have always wanted not a different society, but a better one. What a better society is and how to get it has been one of the persistent problems of philosophy and one of the fundamental issues in the tradition of the Western World. Only those who recognize the important place that philosophy and the wisdom of the race must hold in education for citizenship can hope to educate men and women who can contribute to the improvement of society and who will want to do so. The cults of skepticism, presentism, scientism, and anti-intellectualism will lead us to despair, not merely of education, but also of society.

from Education For Freedom (1943)
Chapter 2

The Great Ideas Online is published free of charge to its members by the Center.

As always, we welcome your comments. We reserve the right to edit all submissions for relevancy and concision and to publish them at our discretion.