Education: Debating in the Groves of Aspen

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During the debate, Adler returned to a pet theory: that the good life promised by American democracy will come only when liberal education is truly universal. Said Adler: "We are hypocrites if we continue to think that the equality of citizenship belongs to all, but not the equality of educational opportunity."

Adler's liberal education began at 15 when he discovered Plato while reading John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. In his own autobiography appearing next month, Philosopher at Large (Macmillan; $12.95), a chatty, often charmingly self-deprecating memoir of Adlerian triumphs and misadventures, Adler reports that Mill persuaded him to sample some of Plato's Dialogues.

Soon afterward, the high school dropout made philosophy his vocation.

As an undergraduate at Columbia in the early '20s, Adler became a bulldozer for truth. In class he bombarded John Dewey with long letters pointing out ambiguities and contradictions in his lectures. Dewey benignly suffered Adler for several weeks and then ordered a young assistant to call him off. Adler concedes: "I was an objectionable student, perhaps repulsive." But he later became a popular teacher, first at Columbia, then for 22 years at the University of Chicago, where he and Robert Hutchins set out in 1930 to revolutionize American undergraduate education by teaching the Great Books. While students lionized Adler, senior colleagues attacked him as a brash upstart who advocated a philosophical "return to the Middle Ages."

In one sense, his critics were right, for Adler still describes himself as an Aristotelian. (When he first started his Aspen programs for executives, Adler and a group actually donned robes to get into the spirit of academe.) He relishes dismissing most of philosophy since Thomas Aquinas as being snarled with pseudo problems. Modern philosophy, claims Adler, got off to "a very bad start" when Descartes and Locke committed the "besetting sin of modern thought": they ignored Aristotle.

Many contemporary philosophers would disagree, and that is largely why, as Adler says, "the Establishment for the most part has ignored me." Yet Adler has never needed their imprimatur for priming non-philosophers with the complicated ideas of Western thought and watching them love it. Says he: "Philosophy is everybody's business."