Mortimer Adler on the Meaning of a Liberal Education

Mortimer Adler, the polymath behind the Great Books of the Western World series, and one of the many leaders behind the modern Great Books movement, wrote numerous essays on the nature of a truly good education and what real learning looks like. There are many essays by Adler that I would encourage you to read, but what I would like to do in this brief meditation is to highlight one that is of importance especially in light of recent arguments to get rid of Liberal Arts or Liberal education in many American universities.  In truth, much of what passes for Liberal education is orientation into ideological propaganda, but that is a matter for another time.
     In the essay Liberal Education–Theory and Practice (1945), Adler explores what is most often misunderstood by educators and now common practice by colleges today.  It is what is replaced by technical training.  In truth, real Liberal education has extraordinary capabilities for students.
     Not willing to shy away from even the language of critics of liberal education in 1945 Adler says, "The direct product of liberal education is a good mind, well disciplined and its present process of inquiring and judging, knowing and understanding, and well furnished with knowledge, well cultivated by ideas." (109, 110)
     Adler, also unwilling to shy away from a good fight, asserts that a B.A. should not signify a completed liberal education and it certainly should not signify that one now has received the proper training to earn a living or even to live a happy life.  A B.A. degree should rather signify, "only decent preparation for the continuing task of adult education." It should be immediately added, that Adler most certainly did not mean by "adult education" what the modern degree factories mean by the term "adult education."  Rather what Adler meant was that the B.A. degree (if earned at a place of learning) enables one to learn the rest of one's life in a truly liberal and humane manner.
     To conclude this reflection with what I consider one of the best definitions of a liberal education found anywhere by anyone in anytime, "In any roomful of people, we would pick out the liberally educated man or woman as the one who manifests all the goods which belong to the intellect. These goods–the truth and various ways of getting at the truth-contribute to a happy life; they may even be indispensable, as is good moral character and some amount of wealth; but by themselves they do not make a man happy.  A liberally educated man, lacking the goods which liberal education does not provide, can be more miserable than those who have these other goods without the benefit of liberal education. Liberal education is a perilous asset unless other and independent factors cooperate in the molding of the person. It is an asset, nevertheless, both because of what he contributes–a good mind, which everyone would enjoy having–and because a good mind is useful, though never by itself sufficient, for the acquisition of all other goods." (110)