Mortimer Adler and James Schall on Education

Sometimes having two authors who never conversed on the same topic do so can be most fruitful. I was wondering recently, what would happen if I interviewed Mortimer Adler and James Schall. While this is a completely fictitious interview, the content is what I would ask them and how they might answer based on select Adler and Schall writings....

In a place beyond time and space as we typically measure those sorts of things, I sat down with Dr. Mortimer Adler and Dr. James Schall to discuss learning and what it means to be educated.

Woods: gentlemen, I cannot thank you enough for your willingness to meet with me and discuss what I know is dear to all three of us, and that is the real meaning of education.

Adler: My pleasure.

Schall: Gladly

Woods: I have told people for as long as I have been teaching that I owe a great debt to both of you. In your writings I have been encouraged, instructed, and inspired to stay diligent to the life of the mind.

Schall: If you have given me, "trust, docility, effort, and thinking" then you have given me what you owe.

Adler: I do not want to begin with quibbling, but, "there are no teachers, only different degrees of learners" so I hope you have been a student of the highest degree.

Woods: This is already delightful!

Faith, Hope, and Love in a Culture of Death: Lois Lowry's The Giver as Film

Let's begin with the film's single greatest obstacle: the culture Philip Rieff described as "the death culture" is not likely to assemble en masse to pay for viewing a morality tale. A central message in this film is that we have become "shadows." Indeed, those immersed in our death culture do not likely have ears to hear and eyes to see the hollow selves we currently are. In a time such as ours, where very little if anything signifies, it is not probable this movie will be understood. At one key moment The Giver declares, "we are living a life of shadows, of echoes." This sentence captures the essence of the death culture. Add to that the following minor problem of our nearly national obsession with spectacle, as evidenced in news shows and recent popular YA movies such as The Hunger Games and Divergent . It is clear our current death culture is taken with the dystopian novel and dystopian movie version of said novel as long as it provides ...

How Twitter Killed Tolstoy or Why You Will Likely Not Finish this Blog

My favorite fictional Professor, aptly described the end of learning. Faber, tells how his class went from Sven Birkerts The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Alan Jacobs Slow Reading in a Hurried Age David Mikics Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital Age Naimi S. Baron My own experience parallels that of Professor Faber. With declining Liberal Arts majors and distracted Great Books students.... Our lives have become as thin as the thinnest flat screen TV. There is a hollowness to our public discourses and our private conversations. It is not surprising how the tone, texture, and content of our verbal exchanges mimic posts on our dominate social media or the headline stories Of course, the title of this blog could have been any of the following: How Instagram Killed How Vine Killed How Facebook Killed How Google+ Killed How LinkedIn Killed

Why I Left the Academy to Join the Academy

After twenty years on the college level I left to be part of a community of people deeply committed to learning. What? Reword to make sections of what has declined in the university studying the liberal arts makes you a better citizen studying the liberal arts makes you more empathetic and compassionate studying the liberal arts teaches you critical-thinking skills studying the liberal arts makes you a capable communicator, in speech and writing knowledge is good for its own sake studying the liberal arts makes life richer a liberal education is meant to teach you what the good life is and equip you to live it "When properly pursued, they constitute something close to a way of life: a set of practices of inquiry conducted by people who share space and time with one another, whose conversations are extended and embodied. If you want to understand the value of a liberal education, in a very real sense you have to be there." ( Alan Jacobs)

Musings of a Christian Humanist

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