Adler's Educational Philosophy
Adler: Educational Philosophy
Where learning happens
- Education is not restricted to classrooms and institutes; individuals learn a great deal with little or no schooling.
- Experience is the biggest teacher.
- Learning in school is only a small part of a lifelong educational process.
- Schooling is at best preparatory.
Six kinds of education
General, specific, preparatory, continuing, terminal, unending.
General education
- A lifelong education that continues after formal schooling ends.
- It is around the age of 60 that a person becomes generally educated.
Liberal education
- Trains individuals in the liberal arts, which are arts of learning.
- Preparatory in nature.
- Equips the student to keep learning after graduation, but they must continue to become generally educated.
Specialised education
- Those whose education is specialised do not learn much after leaving school.
- They expand their expertise within the specialism, but never become generally educated.
- Adler said this was true of most physicians, lawyers, engineers, and PhDs.
Knowledge
- To have knowledge is to possess the truth.
- False knowledge is impossible.
Adler’s philosophy of education starts from a single observation: most of what an educated adult knows was not learned at school. School is a foundation, not the whole house. Once this observation is taken seriously, the right job of school changes, and the most common kinds of education turn out to be incomplete in ways their graduates rarely notice.
Where learning actually happens
Adler opens his account of education with a claim that contradicts the usual picture. Education is not restricted to classrooms and educational institutes. Individuals learn a great deal with little or no formal schooling. Experience is the biggest teacher; learning in school is only a small part of a lifelong educational process; schooling is at best preparatory.
The picture this paints is wider than the picture most schools work with. School in this account is one of several places where learning happens, and the years of formal schooling are a small fraction of the years in which an adult continues to learn. A school designed as the whole of a person’s education is designed for a job it cannot do. A school designed to lay foundations for the rest of life is doing what schooling can actually accomplish.
This is also Adler’s response to the question of how a high-school dropout could become a serious philosopher. The schools missed him, and he learned anyway. The schools were not the only place he could have learned. His experience confirms in the strongest way the claim he repeats throughout his writing: real education does not stop when the classroom does, and may not always need the classroom to start.
The implication for a school is twofold. The school should not pretend it can finish the job. It should also focus its time on the parts of education that genuinely need a school setting: rigorous foundations, exposure to texts the student would not find on their own, training in the methods that let lifelong learning happen.
Mostly outside school; experience is the biggest teacher, and school is at best preparatory
Education is not restricted to classrooms. Individuals learn a great deal with little or no formal schooling. Learning in school is a small part of a lifelong educational process. The implication: a school designed as the whole of a person’s education is doing a job it cannot finish. A school that lays rigorous foundations for the rest of life is doing what schooling can actually accomplish.
The six kinds of education
Adler distinguishes six kinds of education: general, specific, preparatory, continuing, terminal, and unending. The categories overlap, but the distinctions matter.
Three of them name what an education is for. General education aims at developing a person broadly across many areas of life. Specific education aims at preparing the person for a particular role, trade, or specialism. Preparatory education lays foundations on which later education will build.
The other three name how an education ends. Continuing education extends beyond the school years and goes on through adult life. Terminal education stops when the formal schooling ends; the adult learns nothing significant after that. Unending education has no stopping point at all and runs through to the end of the person’s life.
Adler argues that the most desirable combination is general, preparatory, and unending. A school provides a general preparatory education, and the adult continues learning on this foundation, never stopping, never narrowing to a single specialism. The least desirable combination is specific and terminal: training in one trade that ends when the schooling ends. A person who has had only that combination is poorly equipped both for their own life and for participation in the wider society.
The categories are not just descriptive. They are a tool for classifying what an actual school is doing. A school can ask itself: are we general or specific? Are we preparatory or terminal? Are we encouraging the unending continuation or the stopping point? The honest answers usually expose work to be done.
General, specific, preparatory, continuing, terminal, unending, best combination is general, preparatory, unending
The first three name what an education is for: general (broad), specific (one role), preparatory (foundation). The last three name how an education ends: continuing (extends), terminal (stops at school), unending (lifelong). The most desirable combination is general-preparatory-unending. The least desirable is specific-terminal.
General versus specialised education
The most important distinction in Adler’s account is between general education and specialised education, and the consequences each has for the adult that follows.
A person who has received a general, liberal education has been trained in the liberal arts. The liberal arts, Adler explains, are the arts of learning: reading, writing, speaking, listening, the basic methods of clear thinking, the foundational subjects (language, mathematics, history, science, the arts). This kind of education is preparatory: it equips the student with the tools to keep learning long after they have graduated. A liberally trained student has the capacity to go on learning; whether they actually do is up to them.
The general education becomes genuinely general only through continued learning. A liberally trained graduate at twenty-two has the tools but not the full education. It is around the age of sixty, Adler says, that a person becomes generally educated, in the full sense: wise, mature, with a deep understanding built up across decades of reading, thinking, and experience. The thirty-eight years between graduation and full education are not a waiting period. They are the years in which the actual education happens.
A specialised education is different. Individuals whose education is not liberal, or which is specialised in one area, do not learn much after leaving school. What they do learn is mostly within their specialisation, and the learning is for the sake of expanding their expertise rather than for general development. They never become generally educated people. This is true, Adler says directly, of most physicians, lawyers, engineers, and PhDs.
The claim is strong and is meant to be. A specialist who knows everything about one narrow area but cannot reason clearly across the wider questions of human life has been educated in one sense and uneducated in another. They can do their specialised work well. They cannot participate fully in the civic, moral, or cultural conversations that a society depends on. Adler does not deny the value of specialised expertise. He denies that specialised expertise is the same as a complete education.
Liberal education trains the arts of learning; specialised education trains expertise in one narrow area
A liberal education trains the arts of learning: reading, writing, speaking, listening, methods of clear thinking, foundational subjects. It equips the student to keep learning after graduation. Specialised education focuses on expertise within a single area; individuals never become generally educated through it. Most physicians, lawyers, engineers, and PhDs, Adler said, fall into the second category.
A short word on knowledge
Adler closes the chapter with a short epistemological note that anchors everything else. To have knowledge, he writes, consists in possessing the truth. False knowledge is impossible.
The line is not as obvious as it sounds. Many contemporary educational frameworks treat knowledge as belief plus justification, with the truth status of the belief held open or ignored. Adler is more old-fashioned. He treats knowledge as a relation between the mind and the truth. If what is in the mind is not true, it is not knowledge, whatever else it may be. It might be opinion, hypothesis, mistake, or propaganda. It is not knowledge.
The implication for an educator is direct. The job of teaching is not to install whatever beliefs the curriculum specifies. The job is to bring the student’s mind into contact with the truth. An education that successfully installs false beliefs has not produced knowledge; it has produced something else, dressed up to look like knowledge. The educator’s responsibility is to the truth, not to the curriculum, when the two come into tension.
This is part of why Adler put such weight on the great texts. The texts had been tested over centuries by serious readers. They had survived because they did contain truth, even when later readers disagreed with some of their specific claims. A curriculum built on them is more likely to bring students into contact with the truth than a curriculum built on the latest textbook of a passing trend.
Knowledge is a relation between the mind and the truth, not just any belief held with confidence
If what is in the mind is not true, it is not knowledge, whatever else it may be. It might be opinion, hypothesis, mistake, or propaganda. The implication for the educator is that the job of teaching is to bring the student’s mind into contact with the truth, not just to install whatever beliefs the curriculum specifies. The educator’s responsibility is to the truth, not to the curriculum, when the two come into tension.
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