Last week I came across this article from 1941 by Mortimer Adler (the editor of the Great Books of the Western World series, as well as at least one book that's discussed in classical circles: The Paideia Proposal).

I came across it while looking for the source of something I read about a student being the only person who can give themselves an education, and the most important job the teacher can do is inspire the student to want to learn.

I make this post not to make a specific point, but to take note of this for my future reference. In the attached file, the colors of my highlighting don't have any meaning. I only switched colors when two highlights were touching.

An Invitation to the Pain of Learning
An Invitation to the Pain of Learning.pdf
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A couple points I highlighted:

  • We allow older students & adults to continue to behave as kindergarteners (I thought this was newly identified in the 2017 book, The Vanishing American Adult!)
    • Based on his first paragraph, I couldn't tell if he was against play for young children, but I believe that children need both play, and responsibility. It becomes an issue when we don't gradually increase that responsibility as they grow, and hold them accountable to it.
  • Not even college challenges students. (He was writing this in the 1940s!)
  • Adult education is worse than childhood education in terms of coddling the mind.
  • We feel "the important thing is to draw large numbers of people into this educational game, even if after we get them there we leave them untransformed."
  • There are 2 views of education:
    • Filling a person with information
    • Transforming a person's mind and character towards the good
      • I hold to the second, as would the older view of education.
  • Teachers can help with learning, but only "in the process of learning that must be dominated at every moment by the activity of the learner...the activity generally known as thinking. Any learning which takes place without thinking is...learning passively acquired, for which the common name is 'information.'"
  • "Any one who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work–in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do."
    • I don't know if I agree with this. I agree that it involves hard work (reading hard books, wrestling with big ideas, ideas that don't always have a clear right answer), but that's a pre-cursor to the thinking. The thinking comes later, through contemplation. Josef Pieper says in Leisure: The Basis of Culture:
And in the same way, the essence of knowledge does not consist in the effort for which it calls, but in grasping existing things and in unveiling reality. Moreover, just as the highest form of virtue knows nothing of “difficulty”, so too the highest form of knowledge comes to man like a gift—the sudden illumination, a stroke of genius, true contemplation; it comes effortlessly and without trouble.
...
The highest forms of knowledge, on the other hand, may well be preceded by a great effort of thought, and perhaps this must be so (unless the knowledge in question were grace in the strict sense of the word); but in any case, the effort is not the cause; it is the condition.
...
And similarly to know means to reach the reality of existing things; knowledge is not confined to effort of thought. It is more than “intellectual work”.
  • "Not only must we honestly announce that pain and work are the irremovable and irreducible accompaniments of genuine learning, not only must we leave entertainment to the entertainers and make education a task and not a game, but we must have no fears about what is "over the public's head." Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles."
  • "The best adult-education program that has ever existed in this country...had two parts:
    • one consisted of lectures, which so far as possible, were always aimed over the heads of the audience;
    • the other consisted of seminars in which adults were helped in the reading of great books–the books that are over every one's head."
  • "Unless we acknowledge that every invitation to learning can promise pleasure only as the result of pain, can offer achievement only at the expense of work, all of our invitations to learning, in school and out, whether by books, lectures, or radio programs will be as much buncombe as the worse patent-medicine advertising, or the campaign pledge to put two chickens in every pot."

Today, while reading Norms and Nobility by David Hicks, I highlighted a related quote:

What a child can do should not become the sole judge of what the student is asked to do. “A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can,” wrote John Stuart Mill (1944). The activity of learning takes place in a no-man’s-land between what the student can accomplish and what he may not be able to accomplish. This fact sets up a creative tension in education, to which both student and teacher must become accustomed and responsive.