A Case for the Quaint: Mortimer Adler and The Great Ideas Program

     Studying and leading conversations on the Great Books for more than twenty years still produces that sense of awe and wonder, especially when I discover a new tool to aide in the exploration of wisdom.  Unfortunately, this excitement is often curtailed when I engage many of those within the academy. Once, an educationist from our Education Department, with arms folded humphed at me the term "perennialist" which he meant pejoratively, but which I heard as praise. More than once, I have seen the term "quaint" applied to what we do in our Great Books based programs. Of course, the secularists and dehumanized masses deem these writings down right dangerous. It is the notion of being quaint that I seek to ponder for a bit.

     The term quaint, like perennialist, traditional, and related terms are often uttered with contempt today, but these terms have meaning that call for reconsideration. While quaint can be used in a dismissive manner, quaint can also mean attractively unusual or charmingly odd. Spending a bit more time with quaint, we discover that this word's history has good company and was associated with cunning, well-informed, knowledgeable, clever, elaborate, skillful and even old-fashioned but charming. With this in mind, I share with you, some parts of a quaint tool that accompanied The Great Ideas Program first published in 1959. Keep in mind that the booklet, The Great Ideas Program Family Participation Plan for Reading the Great Books of the Western World, was published in that same 1959. As I read this I kept thinking how far we have "progressed" regarding education and the family in the past fifty some years.   

     Entitled "A confidential memorandum" from Robert Hutchins to parents "regarding being educated by your children," the words in this "memorandum" are most assuredly quaint. "Yours is a literate home because you are a literate people. And you are literate people not only because you read great books, but also because you are interested in great ideas. Literacy  of course, involves far more than merely the ability to read and write. Many people are not literate, in the full sense of the word, who can read and write very well. The kind of literacy that means something, however, is the kind that produces intelligent thought and action. 
     It is this kind of literacy that you want your children to have. Unfortunately, their chances of acquiring it in the school today are small and may become smaller if schools become more narrowly technical and vocational. 
     This is one of the prime reasons for your ownership of Great Books and your enrollment in the Great Ideas Program. Certainly other sets of books are decorative, and you might have purchased them. But you didn't buy just books. Instead you bought a family home education program that will effectively help you to have a literate home environment for the care and formation of literate children. 
     This first memorandum was followed by "a very confidential memorandum" to the children in this family, also from Robert Maynard Hutchins. "This is a conspiracy to get you to do some reading and thinking. It is based on the assumption that you believe you don't like books, and this assumption is false. You may not like the books that you have been given to read. They are mostly textbooks, and often textbooks are not good books. As yet you probably haven't had a chance to learn how interesting good books can be.
     Your parents are now enrolled in the Great Ideas Program and are proud owners of the Great Books – the best books ever written. They have every intention of reading them. (They read some of them when they were your age, and one of the sure signs of a great book is that one who has read it wants to reread it.) The trouble is that your parents may insist that they have no time. You can help them by making them take time to read these books. Of course you must play a trick on them, for the way to help is to make them read and discuss the books with you. This is the kind of program that you will enjoy participating in, and these are the kind of books you will enjoy reading. Also, this Plan and its accompanying Personal Consultation Service will answer practically any questions your parents may ask that you can't answer. Don't be afraid to use the services. 
     One thing is sure. These are readings that you will benefit from all the rest of your lives – just as young people have done for hundreds of years before you. These are not the easiest books you have ever read; but I can assure you that they are the most interesting.
     I know you're busy. But you will be even busier later on. Take my advice – don't wait. 
     The teachers cannot make you wise – much as they would like to – because these books are seldom read in school. You will have to help yourself, and here is one chance to do so. The world is going to belong to you, but it is a hard world. You will need to know everything you can to get along and to understand at least some of it. Through this Plan and the Great Ideas Program, the wisdom of the world lies open to you – just waiting for you to tap it. I envy you.

     More than fifty years since these words circulated, we have advanced to the place of wide-spread ignorance--a level of mass educational trendiness that is stupefying.  Of course the American family today is not sitting around reading the Great Books and discussing the Great ideas. Whatever family means today, if sitting around, it is likely absorbed in this season's sitcom. The need for what is quaint is strong in our common and ordinary day. The old-fashioned may indeed rescue us from our abyss of the drab, dull, cutting-edge, and up-to-date.