"The Last Great Aristotelian"

By Ezra Bowen

Surrounded by the classics and a pair of typewriters battered from the writing of 15 books in the past decade, the director of Chicago's Institute for Philosophical Research bounces forward to greet a visitor. "I had two ideas last night," booms Mortimer Adler. This is not a man whose ideas run to trivia. His latest work, "We Hold These Truths" (Macmillan; $16.95), examines the U.S. Constitution, tracking the concept of "rightful authority" back to the Greek statesman Solon, then bringing it forward to culmination in the Constitution's codification of the world's first federal republic. The logic and progression is pure Adler, and the book's initial critical success surely comes as no surprise to the author, a man who recalls not a single failing of self-confidence. "I've never had an identity crisis," he says. "I have no insecurity. I wouldn't know what that was."

Small wonder. Besides having poured out a lifetime total of 40 books, Adler sits as chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, runs his own institute and promotes Britannica's Great Books program (about 250,000 copies sold since 1952), which he conceived and for which he churned out a 1 million-word index in 26 months. Sighs Theodore Sizer, 54, chairman of Brown University's department of education: "If I have that much energy and optimism when I'm his age, I'll be a lucky person."

Adler's age: 84, a span that he reflects upon with profound satisfaction. "The greatest single piece of good fortune anyone can have," he says, "is work worth doing." To Adler, the essence of that work has been educational reform -- away from trendy relativism and back to absolute values, which he believes should be taught from kindergarten through graduate school. He especially deplores the contemporary notion that metaphysics is nonsense and that science and other subjects can be taught without reference to an individual's responsibility to society. "The lack of standards of right and wrong, good and bad, the notion that 'I can't say what a good life is,' weakens the essential fibers of democracy," he charges.

To Adler, those standards are clear as the morning. Among them: liberty, truth, goodness, beauty, equality and justice, all of which he expounded on in a 1981 book entitled Six Great Ideas. He has argued, seduced, wheedled and bullied students to embrace these and other (to him) immutable concepts in thousands of seminars across the country. "By the fact that I started to teach," he says, "I discovered school is not an education." Nor, by his lights, is college. In his view, virtually all colleges have given up the essential liberal-arts core curriculum, which now barely survives in what Adler considers relatively pure form at a few scattered schools, like St. John's in Maryland.

Adler has typically been on the opposite tack from the majority since the beginning of his own education. As a precocious 15-year-old who often told chums, "Be quiet; I'm thinking," he discovered that John Stuart Mill had read Plato by age ten. Forthwith Adler devoured Plato's works. With equal speed and assurance, he acquired his scorn for educational conventions, not to mention conventional educators. Then, as now, he found no use for grades: "What do they measure? The ability of some children to bone up for examinations." Given the power, he would abolish all marks in favor of general ratings (honors, pass, fair) arrived at by essay questions and oral examinations.

As a young professor at the University of Chicago, with its bellwether development of a liberal-arts core, Adler would have seemed to be in his element. But his freewheeling style so offended colleagues in the philosophy department that his friend and patron, President Robert Maynard Hutchins, had to tuck Adler into the law school, where he held the informal title of Professor of Blue Sky. He has always cherished the role of what he calls a "non grata in academe," preferring to communicate his message, largely through his books, to America at large. He has done so with such success that Michael Timpane, president of Columbia's Teachers College, calls Adler "the last great Aristotelian," that is, life master of deductive logic.

Five years ago Adler introduced an iconoclastic program he calls the Paideia (from the Greek word for raising a child) to schools in Atlanta, Chicago and Oakland. Unlike conventional curriculums, with their set-piece texts and lectures, fast-track studies for bright kids and vocational dead ending for slower ones, the Paideia presents the same material to all students, conveyed through Socratic talk between teachers and pupils. It is Adler's conviction that every child can handle the richest offering of broad, humanistic learning. While he concedes that intellectual capacities vary, by his own metaphor, from half-pint to gallon containers, his approach holds that even for slow learners half a pint of Plato is better than half a pint of engine repair.

Adler's critics, of whom there are many, dismiss him as a hip shooter, the fastest opinion west of the Hudson but not worth serious attention. Yet Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, admires Adler's contentiousness. Adler has fought for the idea, says Botstein, that thought "is too important to be left to the Ph.D.s." Declares Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: "He's taken cherished institutions by the scruff of the neck and said, 'Enough!' "

By all indications there will be more scruff-of-the-neckmanship as Adler continues to preach and practice his doctrine. During a recent visit to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Adler challenged a roomful of students with a dialogue on Plato. He put them through a rattling seminar that left the students exhausted and with some urgent questions hanging in the air. "That's the purpose of the seminar, to get you all worried," he told them happily. Worried they were, but Adler departed with his conviction undisturbed -- that pupils of any age can be educated, and the way to do that is to get them involved. At its best, as Adler demonstrates, the involvement is a two-way process that sparks the mind of the teacher as intensely as those of the students: "No matter how many times I do it," he says, "I find conducting seminars the most exciting thing I do."

With reporting by Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago