Reforming Education

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Mortimer Adler has been hailed as "a philosopher for Everyman" {Time), and Reforming Education is his response to the pressing question "What can be done about American education?" Spanning his fifty-year career as one of America's foremost teachers. Reforming Education addresses the controversies about what should be taught in our elementary schools, high schools, and colleges; how it should be taught; for whom this education should be available; and to what end.
At the heart of Reforming Education is Adler's great innovation, the paideia reform, reinstating "the general learning that should be the possession of all human beings." Reforming Education reveals the roots of the paideia proposal in Adler's earliest formulations, and explains why its fundamental principles hold out the promise of a genuine, long-term solution for our basic educational problems. Most of the other solutions, Adler asserts, are ineffective "quick fixes" by contrast.
As its subtitle implies. Reforming... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Mortimer Adler has been hailed as "a philosopher for Everyman" {Time), and Reforming Education is his response to the pressing question "What can be done about American education?" Spanning his fifty-year career as one of America's foremost teachers. Reforming Education addresses the controversies about what should be taught in our elementary schools, high schools, and colleges; how it should be taught; for whom this education should be available; and to what end.
At the heart of Reforming Education is Adler's great innovation, the paideia reform, reinstating "the general learning that should be the possession of all human beings." Reforming Education reveals the roots of the paideia proposal in Adler's earliest formulations, and explains why its fundamental principles hold out the promise of a genuine, long-term solution for our basic educational problems. Most of the other solutions, Adler asserts, are ineffective "quick fixes" by contrast.
As its subtitle implies. Reforming Education also challenges the faulty diagnosis and prescriptive, narrow remedy offered by Allan Bloom and calls for a more democratic approach that embraces all disciplines and all people—the opening of the American mind. Adler provides an eye-opening account of the "great books" programs used at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, and in paideia elementary and secondary schools, and he sheds light on the current academic controversies over which books should be required reading for all students.
Equally important is Dr. Adler's explanation of the skepticism and relativism about moral values so prevalent among students and teachers since the beginning of this century, and readers will find Adler at his best in setting
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forth the necessary steps for establishing a sound, practical, and objectively valid moral philosophy.
Reforming Education concludes with a new listing of the "great books" from antiquity to the present, and stands as a ringing defense of education in the broadest, most humanistic sense of the word. Like his predecessors John Dewey and Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler declares that the best education for the best is the best education for all. It rests on an understanding of teaching and learning that is conspicuously absent from educational policies and practices so typical today.
Mortimer J. Adler is University Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Director of the Institute for Philosophical Research, and Honorary Trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. He is the author of forty-four books, including How to Read a Book, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Sii Great Ideas, How to Speak/How to Listen, A Guidebook to Learning, We Hold These Truths, and The Paideia Proposal.
Ptwtograph by David B. LaClaire Jacket design by Dick Adelson
Copyright © 1989 Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Vissza