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

Observing the Loss of the University

Unless it is dramatic, erosion usually goes unnoticed. Or, unless one leaves for some time and then returns to notice what is often subtle and slow. Cultural shifts are often much like erosion. This is true of the modern American university. Its once impressive place on the landscape as a positive force in shaping society has been in question for several years now. While some of the criticism comes from pragmatists arguing, "it just isn't practical" other critics observe how the university has dug its own grave. One of the most impressive, insightful, and at times caustic analyses of the plight of the loss of the university is agrarian, Wendell Berry. His essay "The Loss of the University" can be found in his Home Economics and it was also recently released by the Trinity Forum as a booklet. When I read it for the first time in 1991, I was struck by how much Berry understood some of the real enemies of the university. Enemies both ins...

Musings of a Christian Humanist

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