Education: Fusilier

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The ground swell is strong and deep: Adler, Hutchins & Co. are only part of it. The atom bomb, more than anything else, showed the U.S. that (in Adler's words) "the more science we have the more we are in need of wisdom to prevent its misuse." Reinhold Niebuhr expressed a growing uneasiness in the U.S. conscience over confused and slipshod morality. Arnold Toynbee found wide response when he attacked the easy optimism which regards history as an endless escalator to progress rather than a continuing struggle between good & evil. The Harvard report on U.S. education (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945) signaled a serious drive in more & more U.S. universities for a unified core of knowledge. More & more educators are realizing the need for 1) greater order, without which freedom is impossible; 2) more attention to moral questions or—as one of them puts it—know-why rather than know-how. Harvard's James Bryant Conant has pointed out the need for the "expert on judging experts." Said Princeton's Dean J. Douglas Brown last week: "The students want to know the values we are protecting, not technical devices." Reported A. A. Suppan, philosophy professor at Wisconsin State Teachers College in Milwaukee, after a round table on the subject: "Many of the students say, 'We need some certainty.' They point out that the Dewey criterion for good—'Will it work?'—can be a measuring stick for totalitarians too."

The Little Bookie. Mortimer Adler started strangling the snake of positivism almost in his cradle. He grew up in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in uptown Manhattan (his father was a jewelry salesman, his mother an ex-schoolteacher). He often told his playmates: "Go away. I'm thinking," and shut the door of his room on them. He was a prolific writer (to get one short story published, he mimeographed his own newspaper, which lasted for two issues). He thought he might become a poet. Sample effort: "Girls are funny creatures / Though some have pretty features / And with their whims and ways / They can put boys in a daze." But his real passion was learning. Says he: "It never occurred to me not to get A's." Once he almost ran away from home when he got a B.

He started to collect a library when still in grade school, and with fanatic neatness insisted that the books must always be kept in exact order. His first pupil was his younger sister Carolyn. The first lesson was an early Adlerian version of evolution. Mortimer declared: "You ought to know the facts of life. First there are fish, then come monkeys, and then little girls. Mother will tell you the rest."

Later, Adler sent her long, peremptory reading lists ("Go to some library and get John Morley's essay, 'On Compromise.' Don't put this off. Get it somehow. Buy it in a bookstore if necessary. I'll go halves with you . . . Which reminds me that you ought to read the New Testament this summer . . .").