Baylor University raised eyebrows in 2010 when it hired Ken Starr, of Clinton impeachment notoriety, to be its president, but he has won over the skeptics.
We try to make adult education as exciting as a football game, as relaxing as a motion picture, and as easy on the mind as a quiz program. Otherwise, we will not be able to draw the big crowds, and 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.
What lies behind my remark is a distinction between two views of education. In one view, education is something externally added to a person, as his clothing and other accoutrements. We cajole him into standing there willingly while we fit him; and in doing this we must be guided by his likes and dislikes, by his own notion of what enhances his appearance. In the other view, education is an interior transformation of a person’s mind and character. He is plastic material to be improved not according to his inclinations, but according to what is good for him. But because he is a living thing, and not dead clay, the transformation can be effected only through his own activity. Teachers of every sort can help, but they can only help in the process of learning that must be dominated at every moment by the activity of the learner. And the fundamental activity that is involved in every kind of genuine learning is intellectual activity, the activity generally known as thinking. Any learning which takes place without thinking is necessarily of the sort I have called external and additive-learning passively acquired, for which the common name is “information.” Without thinking, the kind of learning which transforms a mind, gives it new insights, enlightens it, deepens understanding, elevates the spirit simply cannot occur.
” —“Invitation to the Pain of Learning” by Mortimer Adler (1941)How it happened and what could be done to reverse it
The rise of moral individualism has produced a generation unable to speak intelligibly about the virtuous life.
Sabrina Moran DIV ’12 is a a scholar of theology, a future neuroscientist and, as of July, the eighth-fastest female 24-hour distance runner in North American history.
Joseph Epstein reviews The Cambridge History of the American Novel edited by Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss.
