Max:

During our third class in the Great Ideas at the Institute for Learning in Retirement at American University in D.C., a team from Good Morning America (with Carol Simpson on ABC) came in and filmed some of it -- following an article about one of our members which appeared in The Washington Post. They tell us that it will be aired on Thursday morning at 8:30 Eastern Standard Time. It may only be a few minutes long since the team went into several classes as well as ours. Thought you might like to know this. Hope it turns out well.

Teddy Handfield

Dear Max,

I gained too many pounds this past winter because of a lack of discipline coupled with a lot of commuting and traveling. I began exercising each evening to help work off those extra pounds. The boring repetitious work on exercise machines demands some accompanying audio or visual usefulness. I tried using exercise audio tapes and video tapes but it wasn't enough.

Last night I listened to the first of Dr. Adler's Great Ideas audio series and found that the concentration required made me absolutely forget the dull repetitions for a significantly longer period of time than I could tolerate previously while exercising. In addition, the tapes are about the right length to motivate a good workout. My shoulders and legs are a little sore but I got the message. I had listened to the entire series earlier while commuting but found it difficult to concentrate on the content while driving because of the distractions imposed by other drivers.

This morning I finally opened the December issues of The Great Ideas Online and discovered the advertisement for Dr. Adler's audiobooks. This is an order for all of them.

These tapes are rewarding in more ways than I had imagined.

Gratefully yours,

Roland (Ron) Frerking

Please send me a copy of the following Mortimer Adler audiobooks:

Aristotle For Everybody

Art, The Arts, And The Great Ideas

How To Speak, How To Listen

How To Read A Book

Six Great Ideas

Ten Philosophical Mistakes

We Hold These Truths

Hi Max,

I was reading Schiller's "On Simple and Sentimental Poetry" from the Gateway to the Great Books and found two instances interesting. In one place (pg 164, volume 5) he states, "Without telling what is false, people often speak differently from what they think; ..." This is a direct contradiction to Adler's idea of what a lie is. As he quotes, "Misplacing one's ontological predicate."

The other instance was on pg 209 ff. where Schiller seems to be speaking of our time in speaking of beauty, "Beauty results from the harmony between spirit and sense; it addresses all the faculties of man, and can only be appreciated if a man employs fully all his strength. He must bring to it an open sense, a broad heart, a spirit full of freshness. All a man's nature must be on alert, and this is not the case with those divided by abstraction, narrowed by formulas, enervated by application. They demand, no doubt, a material for the senses, but not to quicken, only to suspend, thought. They ask to be freed from what? From a load that oppressed their indolence, and not a rein that curbed their activity."

"After this can one wonder at the success of mediocre talents in aesthetics? Or at the bitter anger of small minds against the true energetic beauty? They reckon on finding therein a congenial recreation, and regret to discover that a display of strength is required to which they are unequal. With mediocrity they are always welcome; however little mind they bring, they want still less to exhaust the author's inspiration. They are relieved of the load of thought; and their nature can lull itself in beatific nothings on the soft pillow of platitude. In the temple of Thalia and Melpomene - at least, so it is with us - the stupid savant and the exhausted man of business are received on the broad bosom of the goddess, where their intelligence is wrapt in a magnetic sleep, while their sluggish senses are warmed, and their imagination with gentle motions rocked."

Sounds like the result of our current "educational" system.

Regards,

Dan Krudop

EDUCATION AND THE GREAT CONVERSATION: Allan Bloom's Translation of Rousseau's Emile or On Education [1]
by John J. Sheehan
Director, Board of Education
Douglas County School District Re. 1
Castle Rock, Colorado

The conversation I am referring to has two levels of meaning. The first sense of the word comes from what Robert Hutchins called "The Great Conversation." [2] This is a conversation that occurs in the pages of the great works of literature about the great ideas. These books allow the dialogue and debate about important ideas to transcend time. The idea of education is surely among the most talked about in "The Great Conversation" -- as well it should be. But how many of us are at all familiar with this ongoing debate about education among the great minds of western civilization? We tend, I think, to view today's problems in education as somehow unique to our own time. One purpose of this article is to impress upon the reader that earlier ages offer a great deal of wisdom and insight on our own problems.

The second sense of the word conversation is a more intimate one -- a conversation that occurs between the reader and the author. I have just finished a remarkable conversation with one of the great modern thinkers in education -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher and political scientist. My conversation occurred between the pages of Rousseau's monumental masterpiece Emile or On Education. How, you ask, do I engage in such a conversation? I do it by stopping to ask questions about what the author is saying. My questions appear in the margins of the book. I paraphrase the author's important thoughts in notes to myself that appear throughout the book. And, when I am feeling particularly assertive and self-assured, I argue with the author about ideas that seem wrong to me. It takes more time and effort, I will grant you, to read a book in this way, but the experience becomes an active rather than a passive effort. The book becomes a teacher. Not all books deserve such an effort. My second purpose is to convince you, the reader, that Rousseau's Emile is one of those books which will reward you with many insights about the problems of education, if you are willing to actively engage M. Rousseau throughout his more than 400 pages of conversation.

Emile is a "thought experiment" one which is as ingenious as the mental ruminations that led Einstein to his insights about time and space. In this thought experiment, Rousseau offers himself the hypothetical opportunity to raise a child (Emile, of course) from birth to adulthood under absurdly ideal conditions. Social influences, for example, do not occur as long as Rousseau, in his role as teacher, sees the need to protect Emile from them. Rousseau "creates" real-life learning experiences for Emile that would require months or even years to arrange. But, he cares little for such practical problems. The aim of this book is to understand how best to educate a child, while creating a vision of the educated individual and citizen. Rousseau recognized the risk that his book would be dismissed as "less an educational treatise than a visionary's dreams." Such dreams, in my opinion, are what we lack today, and so desperately need.

Rousseau's approach to education is eminently impractical. He suggests an order to learning that would simply never work "in the real world." But, the sharp contrast between what he sees as an "ideal" approach to education and what is "practical" offers some powerful lessons for us today.

From infancy through age 12, Emile receives an education that the reader will find difficult to accept, and which is, admittedly, wholly impractical. Raised in the country, Emile has little opportunity for learning social skills. He has no formal training and no exposure to books (and, certainly, no skills for taking standardized tests!). Nature is his classroom and necessity is his teacher. But, don't mistake this seemingly unstructured life as a period of pure play. The lessons are constant; the learning is real. Emile knows what he needs to know. He focuses on meeting his immediate needs for survival and growth as an individual. As for morals, Emile learns to accept his own limitations and understands better than most adults today the lessons of natural consequences. Emile at age twelve looks nothing like his contemporaries, or our own 6th grade graduates. He is naïve, with little knowledge of or need for explicit moral teachings. "Necessity," Rousseau says, "weighs heavy on him."

During the transition from childhood to adolescence (in this book, from age 12 to age 15), Emile moves from an understanding of natural needs to one of utility. The question "What is that good for?" becomes the motivation for all the activities of student and teacher. Here, at last, Rousseau introduces Emile to his first book. It is Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe -- a book that embodies the lessons of utility and nature, and it is one that Emile is ready to devour.

There are many lessons that Rousseau is eager to delay, but none more than those of individual and social morals. Alas, nature will not be put off, and it is the turmoil of adolescence that finally forces these most difficult of lessons. Adolescence is the critical time in Emile's moral upbringing. "[T]his moment of crisis, although rather short, has far-reaching consequences." Rousseau provides a poignant perspective on puberty and adolescence. He writes:

"As the roaring of the sea precedes a tempest from afar, this stormy revolution is proclaimed by the murmur of the nascent passions. A change in humor, frequent anger, a mind in constant agitation, makes the child almost unmanageable."

Sound familiar? Rousseau, faced with this difficult time, has advantages that we lack today. He has built a level of trust and openness that most parents long for. Perhaps more importantly, Rousseau has maintained an unimaginable innocence in Emile. Rousseau harnesses the natural desires of this age to reach out to others. This is the time in a child's upbringing for seriously discussing morals, history, government, society and even religion. Rousseau's writing makes me painfully aware of how much our high schools squander this great opportunity to grow and learn.

No subject is so cross-cutting, controversial, complex and timeless as education. The great literature across the centuries is replete with writing about education. In fact, the almost compulsive return to the idea of education in great literature is, in itself, an important perspective in these times of growing frustration and fear about the state of public education. Not that I wish to take a Pollyannaish view of the problems we face in public education. As a local school board member, I am only too familiar with them. Nevertheless, the more I read the more I begin to put these questions in their proper context. "Perhaps no age," Mark van Doren wrote in 1943, "has thought its education good enough." [3] Almost 24 centuries ago, Aristotle, in his Politics [4], fretted over what he saw as "the vulgar decline" that education had taken in the understanding of its goals. "At present," he wrote of the confusion in his own time, "opinion is divided about the subjects of education. All do not share the same opinion about what should be learned by the young." It is a confusion we share across the centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is, in Emile, stating his own dissatisfaction with the state of education in his time. And so the tradition continues.

Rousseau's Emile stands out among the many great books on education as one of the most important and influential. Among modern day educators it is both reviled and revered. What greater proof is there for its relevance in today's education debate? In The Schools We Need [5], core knowledge advocate E. D. Hirsch writes bitterly that "Ever since Rousseau's Emile, such optimistic, quasi-religious ideas [have] been attached to theories of education," referring to what Hirsch thinks of as the romantic, naturalistic and progressive theories of education that have such a strong hold on the education establishment. Neil Postman, on the other hand, credits Rousseau with raising the whole idea of childhood to a new level of prominence in our society. [6] In fact, Rousseau's view of books as "the scourge of childhood" presages Postman's modern account of the "disappearance of childhood" due, in part, to the unhealthy and powerful influence of modern media on our children.

Clearly, Rousseau hits a nerve in our modern day minds. And that's a good thing. The more we shake ourselves lose from our own myopic, tired and worn out views of education the better off we all will be. Allan Bloom took on the task of translating Emile for very "selfish" reasons. "I thought it the best way," he writes in the introduction, "to familiarize myself with a book that was very alien to me but which seemed to contain hidden treasures." I admire his attitude. He was drawn to a writer whose views seemed antithetical to his own. Dr. Bloom, well known for his attack against today's higher education in The Closing of the American Mind, recommends only two books for anyone interested in grappling with the problems of education--Plato's The Republic and Rousseau's Emile. "If one takes the two books together," he wrote in 1991, "one has the basic training for the educational wars." [7]

2. Hutchins, Robert. "The Great Conversation," Great Books of the Western World, Vol 1 (Hutchins, R.; Adler, M., eds). Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1952.

3. Van Doren, Mark. Liberal Education. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1943.

4. Aristotle, Politics (Barker, E.; Stalley, R.F., translators). Oxford University Press, New York, 1995.

5. Hirsch, E.D. The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. Doubleday, New York, 1996.

6. Postman, Neil. :The Disappearance of Childhood. Vintage Books, New York, 1994.

7. Plato. The Republic of Plato: Translated with Notes, An Interpretative Essay, and A New Introduction (Allan Bloom, translator), 2nd edition. Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1991.

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