| News
& Views
- Nov, 1990 Issue |
Education Reform
Adler, Mortimer J.
REFORMING EDUCATION: The Opening of the American Mind.
NY:MacMillan Pub. Co., 1988
This is an update of a previous
book by Adler and is his most recent publication supporting the Paideia
Project. He promotes the argument that the Liberal Arts must be the
basis of education if we are to have a truly educated and responsible
citizenry. Adler sees training in the Liberal Arts as the indispensable
way to develop the thinking skills which he breaks down into "the skills
of reading, writing, speaking, listening, calculating, and measuring."
Once a student has mastered these skills, Adler asserts, then and only
then is the student prepared to master any field's subject matter.
The author approaches it from
another way in seeing the goal of education as helping students become
better human beings, and this is done by helping them learn good virtues
(habits). He emphasizes the intellectual and academic, but he might
well look at Special Purpose schools as another model of how these skills
can be taught. Special Purpose schools have found a another way to teach
basic thinking skills within the context of helping young people with
emotional/behavior problems.
As a rule, Special Purpose
schools and programs are very verbal schools, and communication is a
major tool. Talking, listening, and observing the actions of others
is practiced all the time by the students as a way to get in touch with
the emotional pain causing self-destructive and anti-social behavior.
When a student spends countless hours learning to express his or her
real feelings and thoughts to the critical audience of peers and no-nonsense
faculty, the student's speaking skills improve dramatically. At the
same time, this can only happen when the student develops the ability
to listen carefully to the feedback of others. It has also been noticed
that as a student's verbal facility increases, his or her writing facility
increases, which has a positive impact on their reading ability. So
when Special Purpose schools help the student learn success values such
as honesty, trust, accountability, and responsibility (moral values),
the schools are also teaching intellectual values (speaking, listening,
writing, reading). Thinking skills are, of course, further developed
in their more traditional academic curriculum. As a consequence, Special
Purpose schools meet many of the goals Adler calls for. Educators would
do well to learn how these schools are accomplishing this since much
could be imported into more traditional schools.
Copyright
© 1990, Woodbury Reports, Inc. (This article may be reproduced without
prior approval if the copyright notice and proper publication and author
attribution accompanies the copy.) |
