HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  The cause of these errors is probably complex. Partly, they may be due to the false supposition that teaching and research are activities, whereas reading and being taught are merely passive. In part also, these errors are due to an exaggeration of the scientific method, which stresses investigation or research as if it were the only occasion for thought. There probably was a time when the opposite error was made: when men overemphasized the reading of books and paid too little attention to the reading of nature. That does not exucse us, however. Either extreme is equally bad. A balanced education must place a just emphasis on both types of learning and on the arts they require.

  Whatever their causes, the efffect of these errors on American education is only too obovious. They may account for the almost total neglect of intelligent reading throughout the school system. Much more time is spent in training students how to discover things for themselves than in training them how to learn from others. There is no particular virtue, it seems to me, in wasting time to fine out for yourself what has already been discovered. One should save one's skill in research for what has not yet been discovered, and exercise one's skill in being taught for learning what others already know and therefore can teach.

  A tremendous amount of time is wasted in laboratory courses in this way. The usual apology for the excess of laboratory ritual is that it trains the student how to think. True enough, it does, but only in one type of thinking. A roundly educated man, even a research scientist, should also be able to think while reading. Each generation of men should not have to learn everything for themselves, as nothing had ever learned before.

  In fact, they cannot.

  Unless the art of reading is cultivated, as it is not in American education today, the use of books must steadily diminish. We may continue to gain some knowledge by speaking to nature, for it will always answer, but there is no point in our ancestors speaking to us unless we know how to listen.

  You may say there is little difference between reading books and reading nature. But remember that the things of nature are not symbols communicating something from other human mind, whereas the words we read and listen to are. And remember also that when we seek to learn from nature directly, our ultimate aim is to understand the world in which we live. We neither agree nor disagree with nature, as we often do the the case of books.

  Our ultimate aim is the same when we seek to learn from books. But, in this second case, we must first be sure we understand what the book is saying. Olny then can we decide whether we agree or disagree with its author. The process of understanding nature directly is different from that of coming to understand it through interpreting a book. The critical faculty need be employed only in the latter case.

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  I have been proceeding as if reading and listening could both be treated as learning from teachers. To some extent that is true. Both are ways of being instructed, and for both one must be skilled in the art of being taught. Listening to a course of lectures is in many respects like reading a book. Many of the rules I shall formulate for the reading of books apply to taking lecture courses. Yet there is good reason for placing our discussion to the art of reading, or at least placing our primary emphasis on reading, and letting the other applications become a secondary concern. The reason is that listening is learning fron a living teacher, while reading is learning from a dead one, or at least one who is not present to us except through his writing.

  If you ask a living teacher a question, he may really answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you may save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature. When you speak to it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.

  I do not mean, of course, that if the teacher answers your question, you have no further work. That is so only if the question is simply one of the fact. But if you are seeking an explanation, you have to understand it or nothing has been explained to you.

  Nevertheless, with the living teacher available to you, you are given a lift in the direction of understanding him, as you are not when the teacher's words in a book are all you have to go by.

  But books can also be read under the guidance and with the help of teachers. So we must consider the relation between books and teachers—between being taught by books with and without the aid of teachers. That is a matter for the next chapter. Obviously, it is a matter which concerns those of us who are still in school. But it also concerns those of us who are not, for we may have to depend on books alone as the means for continuing our education, and we ought to know how to make books teach us well.

  Perhaps we are better off for lacking teachers, perhaps worse.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Teachers, Dead or Alive

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  We can be instructed by listening to a lecture as well as through reading a book. That is what brings us to the consideration now of books and teachers, to complete our understanding of reading as learning.

  Teaching, as we have seen, is the process whereby one man learns from another through communication. Instruction is thus distinguished from discovery, which is the process whereby a man learns something by himself, through observing and thinking about the world, and not by receiving communicatioin from other men. It is true, of course, that these two kinds of learning are intimately and intricately fused in the actual education of any man. Each may help the other. But the point remains that we can always tell, if we take the pains to do so, whether we learned something we know from someone else or whether we found it out for ourselves.

  We may even be able to tell whether we have learned it from a book or from a teacher.

  But, by the meaning of the word "teaching," the book which taught us something can be called a "teacher." We must distinguish, therefore, between writing teachers and speaking teachers, teachers we learn from by reading and teachers we learn from by listening.

  For convenience of reference, I shall call the speaking teacher a "live teacher." He is a human being with whom we have some personal contact. And I shall call books "dead teachers." Please note that I do not mean to say that the author of the book is dead. In fact, he may be the very alive teacher who not only lectures at us but makes read a textbook he has written.

  Whether or not the author is dead, the book is a dead thing. I cannot talk back to us, or answer questions. It does not grow and change its mind. It is a communication, but we cannot converse with it, in the sense in which we may succeed, once in a while, in communicating something to our living teachers. The rare cases in which we have been able to converse profitably with the author of a book we have read may make us realize our deprivation when the author is dead or at least unavailble for conversation.

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  What is the role of the live teacher in our education? A live teacher may help us to acquire certain skills: may teach us how to cut pin wheels in kindergarten, how to form and recognize letters in the early grades, or how to spell and pronounce, how to do sums and long division, how to cook, sew, and do carpentry. A live teacher may assist us to develop any art, even the arts of learning itself, such s the art of experimental research or the art of reading.

  In giving such aid, more than communication is usually involved. The live teacher not only tells us what to do, but is particulalry useful in showing us how and, even more directly, in helping us to go through the motions. On these latter counts, there is no question that a live teacher can be more helpful than a dead one. The most successful how-to-book cannot take you by the hand or say at the right moment, "stop doing it that way. Do it this way."

  Now, one thing is immediately clear. With respect to all the knowledge we gain by discovery, a live teacher can perform only on function. He obviously cannot teach us that knowledge, for then we could not gain it by discovery. He can only teach us the art of discovery, that is, tell us how to do research, how to observe and think in the p
rocess of finding things out. He may, in addition, help us to become expert in the motions. In general this is the province of a book like Dewey's How We Think and of those who have tried to help students practice according to its rules.

  Since we are primarily concerned with reading—and with the other kind of learning, through instruction—we can limit our discussion to the role of the teacher as one who communicates knowledge or help us to learn from communication. And, for the time being, let us even limit ourselves to considering the live teacher as a source of knowledge, and not as a preceptor who help us learn how to do something.

  Considered as a source of knowledge, the live teacher either competes with or co-operate with dead teachers, that is, with books. By competition I mean the way in which many live teachers tell their students by lectures what the students could learn by reading the books the lecturer himself digested. Long before the magazine existed, live teachers earned their living by being "readers' digests." By co-operation I mean the way in which the live teacher somehow divides the function of teaching between himself and available books: some things he tells the student, usually boiling down what he himself has read, and some things he expects the student to learn by reading.

  If these were the only functions a live teacher performed with respect to the communication of knowledge, it would follow that anything which can be learned in school can be learned outsied of school and without live teachers. It might take a little more trouble to read for yourself than to have books digested for you. You might have to read more books, if books were your only teachers. But to whatever extent, it is true that the live teacher has no knowledge to communicate except what he himself learned by reading, you can learn it directly from books yourself. You can learn it as well if you can read as well.

  I suspect, moreover, that if what you seek is understanding rather information, reading will take you further. Most of us are guilty of the vice of passive reading, of course; but most of people are even more likely to be passive in listening to a lecture. A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.

  Note taking is usually not an active assimilation of what is to be understood, but an almost automatic record of what was said. The habit of doing it becomes a more pervasive substitute for learning and thinking as one spends more years in educational institutions. It is worst in the professional schools, such as law and medicine, and the graduate school. Someone said you can tell the difference between graduate and undergraduate students in this way. If you walk into a classrom and say "Good Morning," and the students reply, they are undergraduates. If they write it down, they are graduate students.

  There are two other functions a live teacher performs, by which he related to books.

  One is repetition. We have all taken courses in school in which the teacher said in class the very same things we were assigned to read in a textbook written by him or one of his colleagues. I have been guilty of teaching that way myself. I remember the first course I ever taught. It was elementary psychology. A textbook was assigned. The examination which the department set for all the sections of this course indicate that the student need only learn what the textbook said. My only function as a living teacher was to help the textbook do its work. In part, I asked questions of the sort that might be asked on an examination. In part, I lectured, repeating the book chapter by chapter, in words not very different from those the author used.

  Occasionally I may have tried to explain a point, but if the student had done a job of reading for understanding, he could have understood the point by himself. If he could not read that way, he probably could not listen to my explanation in an understanding way either.

  Most of the students were taking the course for credit, not merit. Since the examination did not measure understanding but information, they probably regarded my explanations as a waste of their time—sheer exhibitionism on my part. Why they continued to come to class, I do not know. If they had spent as much time reading the textbook as the sport page, and with the same diligence for details of information, they could have passed the examination without being bored by me.

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  The function which remains to be discussed is difficult to name. Perhaps I can call it

  "original communication." I am thinking of the living instructor who knows something which cannot be found in books anywhere. It must be something which he has himself discovered and has not yet made available for readers. This happens rarely. It happens today most frequently in the fields of scholarship or scientific research. Every now and then the graduate school is graded by a course of lectures which constitute an original communication. If you are not fortunate enough to hear the lectures, you usually console yourself by saying that they will probably appear in book form shortly.

  The printing of books has now become such routine and common affair that it is not likely any more that original communications must be heard or lost. Before Caxton, however, the living teacher probably performed this function more frequently. That was why students traveled all over medieval Europe to hear a famous lecturer. If one goes back far enough in the history of European lerning, one comes to the early time before knowledge had been funded, before there was a tradition of learning whoch one generation received from its predecessor and passed on the next. Then, of course, the teacher was primarily a man of knowledge and communicator secondarily. I mean he had first to get knowledge by discovering it himself, before he could teach it to anyone else.

  The present day situation is at the other extreme. The living teacher today is primarily a man of learning, rather than a discoverer. He is one who has learned most of what he knows from other teachers, alive or dead. Let us consider the average teacher today as one who no original communication to make. In relation to dead teachers, therefore, he must be either a repeater or digester. In either case, his students could learn everything he knows by reading the books he has read.

  With respect to the communication of knowledge, the only justification for the living teacher, then, is a practical one. The flesh being weak, it takes the easier course. The paraphernalia of lectures, assignments, and examinations maybe a surer and more efficient way of getting a certain amount of information, and even a little understanding, into the rising generatioins's heads. Even if we had trained them how to read well, we might not be able to trust them to keep at the hard work of reading in order to learn.

  The self-educated man is as rare as the self-made man. Most men do not become genuinely learned or amass large fortunes through their own efforts. The existence of such men, however, shows it can be done. theirrarity indicates the exceptional qualities of character—the stamina and self-discipline, the patience and perseverance—which are required. In knowledge as in wealth, most of us have to be spoon-fed to the little we possess.

  These facts, and their practical consequences for institutional education, do not alter the main point, however. What is true of the average teacher is equally true of all textbooks, manuals, and syllabi. These, too, are nothing but repetitions, compiliations, and condensations of what can be found in other books, often other books of the same sort.

  There is one exception, however, and that makes the point. Let us call those living teachers who perform the function of original communication the primary teachers.

  There are few in every generation, though most are primary and secondary teachers who are alive now, so among dead teachers we can make the same distinction. There are primary and secondary books.

  The primary books are those which contain original communications. They need not be original in entirety, of course. On the contraray, complete originality is both iinpossible and misleading. It is impossible except at the hypothetical beginning of our cultural tradition. It is misleading because no one should try to discover for himself what he can be taught by others. The best sort of originality is obviously that which adds something to the fund of knowled
ge made available by the tradition of learning. Ignorance or neglect of the tradition is likely to result in a false or shllow originality.

  The great books in all fields of learning are, in some good sense of the word, "original"

  communications. These are the books which are usually called "classics," but that word has for most peopoe a wrong and forbidding connotation—wrong in the sense of referring to antiquity, and forbidding in the sense of sounding unreadable. Great books are being written today and were written yesterday, far from being unreadable, the great books are the most readable and those which most deserve to be read.

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  What I have said so far may not help you to pick out the great books from all others on the shelves. I fact, I shall postpone stating the criteria which betoken a great book—

  criteria which also help you tell good books from bad—until much later (in Chapter Sixteen, to be precise). I might seem logical to tell a person what to read before telling him how, but I think it is wiser pedagogy to explain the requirements of reading first.

  Unless one is able to read carefully and critically, the criteria for judging books, however sound they may be in themselves, are likely to become in use just arbitrary rules of thumb. Only after you have read some great books competently will you have an intimate grasp of the standards by which other books can be judged as great or good.

  If you are impatient to know the titles of the books which most competent readers have agreed upon as great, you can turn now to the Appendix in which they are listed; but I would advise waiting until you have read the discussion of their characteristics and contents in Chapter Sixteen.

  There is, however, one thing I can say about the great books here. This may explain why they are generally readable, even if it does not explain why they should be generally read. They are like popularizations in that most of them are written for ordinary men and not for pedants of scholars. They are like textbooks in that they are intended for beginners and not for specialists or advanced students. You can see why that must be so. To the extext that they are original, they have to address themselves to an audience which starts from scratch. There is no prerequisite for reading a great book except another great book in the tradition of learning, by which the later teacher may have himself been taught.