HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  So much for the vicious circle as it moves in one direction. Now, coming around the other way, we find there is not much point in trying to read the great books with students who have no preaparation at all in the art of reading from their prior schooling and are not getting any in the rest of their education. That was the trouble with the Honors cours at Columbia in my day, and I suspect it still is the case with similar reading courses now given there.

  In one course, which takes a small part of the students' time, you cannot discuss the books with him and also teach him how to read them. This is especially true if he comes from an elementary and secondary schooling which has paid little attention even to the rudiments of reading skill, and if the other courses in college which he is taking concurently make no demands on his ability to read for enlightment.

  That has been our experience here in Chicago, too. Mr. Hutchins and I have been reading the great books with students these last ten years. For the most part, we have failed if our aim was go tive these students a liberal education. By a liberally educated student, one who deserves the degree of bachelor of liberal arts, I mean one who is able to read well enough to read the great books and who has in fact them read well. If that is the standrad, we have seldom succeeded. The fault may be ours, of course, but I am more inclined to think that we could not, in one course out of many, overcome the inertia and lack of preparation due to the rest of the antecedent and concurrent schooling.

  The reform of education must start far below the college level and it must take place radically at the college level itself, if the art of reading is to become well developed and the range of reading is to be adequately by the time the bachelor's degree awarded.

  Unless that does happen, the bachelor's degree must remain a travesty on the liberal arts from which it takes its name. We will continue to gradute, not liberal artists bu chaotically informed and totally undisciplined minds.

  There is only one college that I know of in this country which is trying to turn out liberal artists in the true sense. That is St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. There they recognize that four years must be spent in training students how to read, write, and reckon, and how to observe in a laboratory, at the same time that they are reading the great books in all fields. There they realize that there is no point trying to read the books without developing all the arts needed to read them, and likewise that it is impossible to cultivate these basic intellectual skills without at the samt time giving the right matter toexercise them on.

  They have many handicaps to overcome at St. John's, but not lack of interest in the students or unwillingness to do the work which is required of no other college students today. The students do not feel that their sacred liberties are being trampled on because they do not have the freedom of elective choices. What is good for them educationally is prescribed. The students are interested and are doing the work. But one of the major handicap is that the students come to St. John's from high schools which turn them out totally unprepared. Another is the inability of the American public, the parents as well as the educators, to appreciate what St. John's is trying to do for American education.

  This is the deplorable state of American education today, despite the pronouncements and programs of some of its leaders.

  President Butler has writter eloquently, in his annual reports and elsewhere, of the primary importance of such intellectual disciplines as manifest themselves in good writing and reading. He has summarized the truth about the tradition of learning in a single pragraph:

  Only the scholar can realize how little that is being said and thought in the modern world is in anys sense new. It was the colossal triumph of the Greeks and Romans and of the great thinkers of the middle ages to sound the depths of almost every problem which human nature has to offer, and to interpret human thought and human aspiration with astounding profundity and insight. Unhappily, these deep-lying facts which should be controlling in the life of a civilized people, are known only to few, while the many grasp, now at an ancient and well-demonstrated falsehood ahd how at an old and well-proved truth, as if each had all the attractions of novelty.

  The many need not be unfortunate, if schools and colleges trained them to read and made them read the books which constitute their cultural heritage. But it is not being done, certainly not to any extent, at Columbia or Harvard, at Princeton, Yale, or California. It is not being more spoken than Dr. Butler, and has been unquestionably explicit in his plan for the reform of the college curriculum so that the ends of liberal education may ve served.

  Why? There are many causes, not the least of which are such familiar ones as the inertia of vested interests; the devotion of most college teachers to competence in some field of specialized research rather than in general or liberal education; and undue magnification of the scientific method and its latest findings. But one other cause, certainly, is general apathy about this whole business of reading, an apathey which comes, I think, from an equally general lack of understading of what is involved. I have often wondered if the situation could be changed until the faculties themselves had learned to read the great books and had read them—not the rew which belong to their own academic niche, but all of them.

  - 7 -

  The situation I have described exists not only in school but outside as well. The public is paying for the education; it must be satisfied with what it is getting. The only way that one can account for the failure of the public to rise up in arms is that it doesn't care or that it really doesn't understand what's wrong. I cannot believe the first. It must be the second. An educational system and the culture in which it exists tend to perpetuate each other.

  There is a vicious circle here too. Perhaps it can be broken by adult education, by making the adult population aware of what is wrong with the schools they went through and to which they are now sending their children. One of the first thing to do is to make them appropriate what a liberal education could be in terms of skill reading and writing, and the profit in books to be read. I would rather try to overcome their apathy than to addres myself to some of my colleagues in the educational business.

  That the general public is also apathetic about reading cannot be questioned. You know it, and do not have to be told. The publishers know it also. It might interest you to eavesdrop on the publishers talking about you, the general public, their trade. Here is one addressing his fellow publishers in their weekly trade journal.

  He begins by saying that "college graduates who do not know how to read constitute a major indictment of American educational methods, and a constant challenge to the country's publishers and booksellers. Large numbers college educators do know how to read, but there are far too many whose acute reading apathy might be described as an occupational disease.

  He knows what the trouble is: "Students are taught by teachers who are themselves victims of the same educational process, and who openly or sub-consciously have a positive distaste for disinterested reading... Instead of stepping forth as an eager candidate for continuing education, who should look forward to a lifetime of learning and reading after commencement, we get an unripe bachelor of arts, who is scarcely an adult and who shuns education like the plague."

  He calls upon the publishers and booksellers to do their share in winning the nation back to books, and concludes thus:

  If the five million college graduates of this country increased their book-reading time by even as little as ten percent., the results would be tremendous. If people generally changed their intellectual fuel or re-charged their mental batteries with same reggularity they devoted to changing motor oil every thousand miles, or replacing frayed playing cards, there might be something like a rebirth of learning in our republic... As it is, we are distinctly not a book-reading country. We wallow in magazines, and drug ourselves with movies...

  People sometimes marvel at spectacular best-sellers like The Outline of History, The Story of Philosophy, The art of Thinking, or Van Loon's Geography—books which sell in hund
reds of thousands, and sometines reach a million readers. My comment is "Not enough!" I look at the census figures, and behold the intellectual apathy of most college men, and exclaim "Wait till the graduates begin reading!" I applaud Walter B. Pitkin's commencement day advice. "Don't sell your books and keep yor diplomas. Sell your diplomas, if you can get anyone to buy them, and keep your books."

  To sum it all up, too many men and women use their college degrees as an official license to "settle down" in an intellectual rut, as a social sanction exempting them from thinking their own thoughts, and buying their own books.

  Another publishers says, "millions of people who can read and do read newspapers and magazines never read books." He figures out they might be induced to read books if they were only made a little more like magazine articles—shorter, simpler, and designed in general for those who like to run while reading. This enter rise, called The People's Library, and described as "a scientific effort to increase the reading of serious books,"

  seems to me to defeat its own avowed purpose. You cannot elevate people by going down to their level. If they succeed in geting you there, there they will keep you, for it is easier to get you to stay down than for them to move up.

  Not by making books less like books, but by making people more like readers, must be the change be effected. The plan behind The People's Library is as blind to the causes of the situations its sponsors are trying to cure as the people are at Harvard who complain about the rampant tutoring schools, without realizing that the way to remedy that evil is to lift the Harvard education above the level where the turoting schools can prepare students more efficiently for ene examinations than the faculty can.

  The publishers are not concerned so much about the reading of the great books as about the good new books they would like to publish if they could find readers for them. But they know—or if they don't, they should—that these two things are connected. The ability to read for enlightment, and consequent upon that the desire to do so, is the sine qua non of any serious reading. It may be that the causal sequence works either way.

  Starting with good current books, a reader may be lead to the great books, or vice versa.

  I am sure that the readr who does one will eventually do the other. I would guess that the probability of this doing either is higher if he has ever once read a great book through and with suficient skill to enjoy his mastery fo the subject mattter.

  - 8 -

  This has been a long jeremiad. There has been much weping and gnashing of teeth about the state of the nation. Because you just dislike the words, you may despari of "a new deal," or maybe you are the hopeless type who says, "'Twas ever thus." On the latter point. I must disagree. There have been times in European history when the level of reading was higher than it is now.

  In the late Middle Ages, for instance, there were men who could read better than the best readers today. Of couse, it is true that there were fewer men who could read, that they had fewer books to read, and that they depended upon reading more than we do as a source of learning. The point remains, however, that they mastered the books they valued, as we mastered nothing today. Maybe we do not respect any book as they valued the Bible, the Koran, or the Talmud; a text of Aristotle; a dialogue of Plato; or the Institute of Justinian. However that may be, they developed the art of reading to a higher point than it ever reacherd before or since.

  We must get over all our funny prejudices about the Middle Ages and go to the men who wrote exegeses of Scripture, glosses on Justinian, or commentaries on Aristotle for the most perfect models of reading. These glosses and commentaries were not condensations or digests. They were analytical and interpretative readings of a wrothy text. In fact, I might as well confess here that I have learned much of what I know about reading from examining a medieval commentary. The rules I am going to prescribe are simply a formulation of the method I have observed in watching a medieval teacher read a book with his students.

  Compared to the brilliance of thw twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the present era is much more like the dark ages of the sixth and the seventh centuries. Then the librarires had been burned or closed. There were few books available and fewer readers. Today, of course, we have more books and libraries than ever before in the history of man. In one sense, too, there are more men who can read. But it is the sense in which this is true that makes the point. So far as reading for understanding goes, the libraries might just as well be close and the printing presses stopped.

  But, you will say, we are libing in a democratic era. It is mnore important that many men should be able to read a little than a few men should be able to read well. There is some truth in that, but not the whole truth. Genuine participation in democratic processes of self-government requires greater literacy than many have yet been given.

  Instead of comparing the present with the late middle ages, let us make the comparison with the eighteenth century, for in its way that was a period of enlightenment which sets a relevant standard for us. The democratization of society had already then begun. The leaders of the movement, in this country and abroad, were liberally educated men, as no college graduate is today. The men who wrote and ratified the Constitution knew how to read and write.

  While we have properly undertaken to make the public education more widespread than it was in the eighteenth century education need not become less liberal as it becomes more universal. At every level and for all elements in the population, the same kind of education—for freedom through discipline—which enabled democracy to take root in this country must be regained if its flowering it to be protected today from the winds of violence abroad in the world.

  All you have to do is to read the writings os John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, to know that they could read and write better than we or our leaders can today. If you look into the curriculum of the colonial colleges, you may discover how this happened. You will discover that a liberal educatiion was once given in this country. True, not everyone received this liberal education. Democracy had not het matured to the point of widespread popular education.

  Even today it may true that some part of the population must be vocationally trained, while another part is liberally educated. For even a democracy must have leaders, and its safety depends on their caliber, their liberalism. If we do not want leaders who boast of thinking with their blood, we had better educate and, more than that, cultivate a respect for those who can think with their minds, minds liberated by discipline.

  One point more. There is a lot of talk today, among liberal educators who fear the rise of Fascism, about the dangers of regimentation and indoctrination. I have already pointed out that many of them confuse discipline with Prussian drill and the goose step.

  They confuse authority, which is nothing but the voice of reason, with autocracy or tyranny. But the error they make about indoctrination is the saddest. They, and most of us, do not know what docility is.

  To be docile is to be teachable. To be teachable one must have the art of being taught and must practice it actively. The more active one is in learning from a teacher, dead or alive, and the more art one uses to master what he has to teach, the more docile one is.

  Docility, in short, is the precise opposite of passivity and gullibility. Those who lack docility—the students who fall asleep during a class—are the most likely to be indoctrinated. Lacking the art of being taught, whether thath be skill in listening or in reading, they do not know how to be active in receiving what is communicated to them.

  Hence, they either receive nothing at all or what they receive they absorb uncritically.

  Slighting the three R's in the beginning, and neglecting the liberal arts almost entirely at the end, our present education is essentially illiberal. It indoctrinates rather than disciplines and educates. Our students are indoctrinated with all sorts of local prejudices and predigested pap. They have been fattened and made flabby for the demogogues to prey upon. Their resistance to specious authority,
which is nothing but pressure of opinion, has been lowered. They will even swallow the insidious porpaganda in the headlines of some local newspapers.

  Even when the doctrines they impose are sound democratic ones, the schools fails to cultivate free judgement because they have forsaken discipline. They leave their students open to opposite indoctrination by more powerful orators or, what is worse, to the sway of their own worst passions.

  Ours is a demagogic rather than a democratic education. The student who has not learned to think critically, who has not come to respect reason as they only arbiter of truth in human generalizations, who has not been lifted out of the blind alleys of local jargons and shibboleths, will not be saved by the orator of the classroom from later succumbing to the orator of the platform and the press.

  To be saved, we must follow the precept of the Book Common Prayer: "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest."

  CHAPTER SIX

  On Self-help

  - 1 -

  All my cards are on the table now. Now you know that I have an ulterior motive in writing a book designed to help people learn how to read. For years I have watched the vicious circle which perpetuates things as they and wondered how it could be broken. It has seemed hopeless. Today's teachers were taught by yesterday's, and they teach those of tomorrow. Today's public was educated in the schools of yesterday and today; it cannot be expected to demand that the schools change tomorrow. It cannot be expected to make demands if it does not know intimately, as a matter of its own experience, the difference between real education and all the current impostures. That "if' gave me the clue. Why couldn't it be made a matter of people's experience, instead of their having to rely on hearsay and all the crosscurrents of talk among disputing experts.