Void House Book Club: The Paideia Proposal

I talked about politics in my last book club post on The Republic. I expected to return to them in a few entries with my post on Aristotle’s Politics. However, during a conversation with a friend, I made an argument that helped me understand that The Paideia Proposal is a political book, and I will have to talk about politics now. The argument read as follows:

“If people are both virtuous and competent, then they will produce a prosperous society in any form of government. So it follows that the form of the government is less important than the qualities of the people living in the state. Thus, our primary goal should be to produce better quality people, which is the purpose of education. So education is bar none the most important element of any society.”

I think this proceeds easily enough, and although I don’t expect everyone to agree that education is the single most important element of society, I think many will agree it is at the very least exceptionally important. Thus, there is great value in asking questions about education. The most fundamental are what students should learn, and how students should learn, and whether all students should learn the same way or not. Mortimer Adler offered a response to all of these.

I said in my entry on the Pentateuch (actually, my very first sentence written on this blog) that Mortimer Adler was among my favorite philosophers. In fact, this is slightly inaccurate. Adler is one of my favorite people who is a philosopher, but he is not one of my favorite philosophers per se. He was a Thomist, which is a school I don’t really respect (brief explanation: St. Thomas Aquinas was both a Catholic and an Aristotelian, and so he wanted to synthesize these views, so he selectively chose or invented those arguments that supported him and ignored the rest; today, we start from facts and reach a conclusion, rather than start from a conclusion and come up with facts). The reason I admire Adler is for his work as an educational theorist, a term depressingly not in widespread use given it is my ultimate career aspiration. Adler’s core theory is that there exists some set of eternal ideas which people have discussed and written about for centuries, and that the purpose of education is for people to develop understanding of and opinions on these ideas. He also held that there exist a finite number of “Great Books” which discuss the great ideas and from which readers can learn more than other books. He even published all of the great books as a collection, which is probably what he’s most well known for.

There are flaws in both the great ideas and the great books. The great books are merely too limited, because they include no books published after 1952 nor any books published outside of the west (actually, the title of the collection was “Great Books of the Western World,” so they were aware of this deficiency, but a modern reader would still expect works from other traditions). The great ideas are more problematic, in that they include some ideas that seem limited and unimportant, and exclude others that seem crucial. Why is Angel a great idea, but not, say, chemistry? Surely our understanding of chemistry enriches our lives far more than angels do.

However, the core idea — that a person achieves betterment by exposure to important ideas and texts — is correct. My educational hypothesis is that all people are composites of all experiences they’ve ever had, and that we therefore derive value from all of our valuable experiences, even if we can’t explain how. This was actually the topic of my GRE essay. Another way to think of it is this: you might not be able to think of a particular reason that people should read Shakespeare, but wouldn’t you rather live in a world in which everyone had read and understood Shakespeare? Adler takes this idea to its logical extreme, which is the reason he presents an admirable system of education.

I bought The Paideia Proposal in hopes it would expound further on this. It advertised itself as Mortimer Adler’s educational manifesto, which I took to mean the full composite of his ideas on education. I was shocked when it arrived and it was so thin that the full width of the book could give you a papercut. It was so short that you can probably read the entire thing in the time it takes you to read this blog post. But I already tricked you into reading this instead, so, ha! 

The Paideia Proposal does not mention the great ideas or great books at all. It focuses on something entirely different: the democratic value of education. Adler recognized that a democracy depends upon the competency of the voters, in that voters need the intelligence necessary to differentiate good candidates from bad ones. Of course, voters are people, and many people are quite stupid, so many people do not wield their vote responsibly. Adler’s solution was to make more intelligent voters.

To be honest, the method of doing so is not so interesting. He said that students should learn the core subjects of English, Science (including Math), and Social Studies, as well as a foreign language and physical education, and something called “an introduction to the world of work” upon which he fails to expound. He also promotes a system of mixed teaching styles, focusing mostly on coaching but also some lecturing and socratic seminars. He argues that the student always learns himself, and that a teacher cannot force an uncooperative student to learn, which is obviously correct. I have little to say on this, because most of it is pretty mainstream, and the only part I take issue with is that I think he should include some more school subjects (but we’ll get to that when I outline my ideal school in some other blog post). The more interesting contention is that all students should be taught the same curriculum.

There is a line in this book that I really, really want to quote, but can’t because I can’t find an online copy of the book to save my life. I will paraphrase it as: “We cannot speak out of both sides of our mouth, claiming on one side that all people are created equal, and on the other that our children cannot all learn the same thing.” I found this line captivating, because Adler showed that two common beliefs in his America contradicted each other, but just takes it for granted that the belief in equality is correct and the belief in inequality is wrong. This is why he thinks all students should learn the same thing; they are all equally educable, and they will all need to reach the same level of competency to perform well as citizens. Of course, if he’s wrong, then he would have to rescind support for democracy. After all, why should an unintelligent person’s vote have the same value as an intelligent person’s?

Adler was wrong. I respect that at the time he wrote, the premise that all students are educable might have seemed quite obvious. Maybe in 1982 he saw students perform at similar levels, and he saw that the major difference between high-achieving students and low-achieving ones was the quality of their schooling, and he naturally concluded that the quality of school determines the student’s performance. This is perfectly forgivable. If he lived in 2025, I don’t think he would make this mistake. I have been a teacher since I graduated college two years ago. Before moving to China, I taught in Title I schools in Philadelphia. I can say, with absolute certainty, that there exist ineducable students. The main problem is one Adler pointed out himself: a teacher cannot force a student to learn. Students may be children, but they are still humans, and like all humans they have agency. If they choose to do something, they will do it, and we can’t stop them. We can only respond to their behavior with punishment. However, in modern American education, students do not get punished so they’re free to do whatever they like — and very few of them like to learn. Most like to treat the classroom like a playground, screaming, running around, causing fights, and so on. Consequently, the teacher’s job is to manage their behavior and not to educate them, and because they want something different from what the teacher wants, the two develop a combative relationship. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t education a collaboration of the teacher and the student towards the common goal of the student knowing more than he did before? If that’s how you conceptualize education, then something like The Paideia Proposal makes sense. But if students are dedicated to ignorance, as so many of them are now, then The Paideia Proposal has no hope.

The Paideia Proposal presents a fortuitous argument against democracy. There are people in the world who refuse to learn, and as such, not everyone will ever reach the right level of intelligence to make political decisions. This is okay — not everyone needs to be a political agent. Because of this, not everyone needs the same education. Some people need primarily training in manual labor, because they will never benefit from a more robust education. When we try to teach incapable and highly capable students simultaneously, we do not raise the level of the incapable students. All we do is divert resources and attention from the capable ones, limiting their capacity to achieve. This is why I limit my dream school to gifted students alone. If we are to produce the greatest citizens, equity will never do.