Criticisms of Adler and an Introduction to Pragmatism
Adler: Criticism
Great Books
- The biggest criticism of the Great Books programme was ethnic and gender exclusion.
- The list was charged with racism and sexism by later critics.
- The reading list was ethnically exclusive and excluded female authors.
Adler’s idealism
- The most consistent criticism over the years has been Adler’s idealism.
- The Paideia Proposal is sometimes called a naïvely optimistic reform.
- The proposal assumed all children are of the same nature.
- Adler believed in a supersensible world that exists only ideally.
Pragmatism: Introduction
When and where
Pragmatism is a contemporary American educational theory that began around the 1870s in the United States.
Who
- Charles S. Peirce was the founder of pragmatism.
- John Dewey methodically implemented pragmatism in American institutions.
Core claims
- Reality is constantly changing.
- Humans are researching, verifying beings interacting with reality.
- Education is a process of learning to think critically and engage in problem-solving using the principles of scientific method.
- Practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge, meaning, and value.
- The world of experience, accessible to scientific inquiry, is all we can know.
- Propositions and acts have meaning only in terms of their verifiable public consequences.
Pragmatism’s basic doctrine
- If it works, use it.
- Where there is a will, there is a way.
- Results are what count.
- The test for truth is the individual themselves.
A philosophical system as ambitious as Adler’s attracts equally ambitious criticism. The standard charges against the Paideia Proposal and the Great Books programme are worth taking seriously. They point to real failures that survive whatever defences a sympathetic reader can offer. The article works through the criticisms and then turns to pragmatism, the American philosophy that would soon offer a different educational programme through the work of John Dewey.
The Great Books criticisms
The Great Books of the Western World programme has attracted the loudest criticism of Adler’s projects. The list of books Adler chose has been challenged on grounds of ethnic and gender composition. Critics have charged the programme with racism and sexism, pointing to the ethnically exclusive list and the absence of female authors.
The charges have force. The original Great Books set published in 1952 included almost no authors who were not white European or American men. Authors from Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American traditions were largely absent. Women appeared only at the margins. The set was presented as the Great Books of the Western World, and Adler defended the focus by saying the project did not claim to cover everything. But the implicit message was that the great human conversation took place mainly among white European men, and that message has not aged well.
The honest defence of the original project recognises the limits and points to the underlying method. The method (slow, careful, discussion-based reading of important texts) does not require the list to consist of dead European men. The same method can be applied to a wider list. Later editions of the Great Books programme have broadened the reading lists to include more women and more non-Western voices. The Great Books Foundation, which still operates, has published expanded materials that retain Adler’s pedagogical model while extending the range of texts.
A teacher today who wants to use Adler’s model can do so with a much wider reading list. The principle Adler defended (that ordinary readers can engage with serious texts through discussion) survives the criticism. The specific selection in 1952 does not.
The reading list was ethnically and gender-exclusive, dominated by white European men
The original 1952 set included almost no authors who were not white European or American men. Authors from Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American traditions were largely absent; women appeared only at the margins. The criticism has force. The pedagogical model (slow careful reading of important texts in discussion groups) survives the criticism and can be applied to a much broader reading list, which later editions and adaptations have done.
The idealism criticism
The most consistent philosophical criticism of Adler over the years has been about his idealism. The Paideia Proposal, critics have argued, is naïvely optimistic. It assumes things about children and about schools that the actual world does not deliver.
The proposal assumes that all children are of the same nature. This is the proposal’s most ambitious claim and its most contested. The claim is not that children are the same in every respect; children obviously differ in abilities, interests, and preparation. The claim is that every child has the same basic capacity for rigorous liberal education and deserves the same opportunity to develop that capacity. Critics have argued that this assumption ignores real differences in cognitive ability, in motivation, in family support, and in the readiness children bring to school. A programme designed on the assumption that the same education will work for everyone will fail many of the students it is trying to serve.
Adler’s response was that the contrary assumption (that some children cannot benefit from the full education) has produced exactly the tracking systems and the underestimation of human intelligence that he spent his life fighting. He preferred to err on the side of treating all children as capable, even at the cost of some failures, rather than to err on the side of sorting some children out of the full education before they had a chance to show what they could do.
The deeper philosophical criticism is that Adler believed in a supersensible world that exists only ideally. This is the Platonic-Aristotelian inheritance in his thought. Adler treated the ideas, values, and great works as standing for something real but not material, accessible to the mind in a way the physical world is not. Modern naturalistic philosophy is suspicious of this picture. If reality consists only of what the natural sciences can study, then the supersensible world of ideas and values is at best a way of talking about regularities in the physical world, not a separate domain of being.
The naturalistic alternative is pragmatism, and the article turns to it next. Pragmatism rejects the idealist picture and grounds the educational programme in the natural world of experience. The contrast with Adler is sharp, and the contrast is part of what made twentieth-century American educational philosophy interesting.
The proposal is naïvely optimistic and assumes all children are of the same nature
Critics argue the proposal ignores real differences in cognitive ability, motivation, family support, and school readiness; the same education will fail many students. Adler’s deeper philosophical commitment is to a supersensible world that exists only ideally, a Platonic-Aristotelian inheritance that modern naturalistic philosophy is suspicious of. The criticism that bites most is the practical one: even committed Paideia schools have to build in supports for less-prepared students.
Pragmatism as the alternative
Pragmatism is the contemporary American philosophy that arose at the same time the Paideia model was being argued for, and that would soon take over much of American educational practice through the work of John Dewey. The two movements grew up in the same country and disagreed almost completely on what reality, knowledge, and education are.
Pragmatism began around the 1870s in the United States. Charles S. Peirce was the founder, a logician and mathematician working at Harvard. John Dewey, the philosopher who is the subject of the next chapter, methodically implemented pragmatism in the daily affairs of American educational institutions. Between Peirce and Dewey, pragmatism moved from a technical philosophical doctrine to the working philosophy of a major school of American education.
The core claims of pragmatism contradict the idealist picture point for point. Pragmatists see reality as constantly changing rather than as a stable supersensible order. They see humans as researching, verifying beings interacting with reality rather than as minds contemplating eternal ideas. They see education as a process of learning to think critically and engage in problem-solving using the principles of scientific method, not as a process of receiving the great ideas through the great works.
The central pragmatist commitment is that practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge, meaning, and value. A claim is true if it works, meaning if acting on it produces the results that it predicts. A concept has meaning to the extent that it makes a difference in practice. A value is real to the extent that pursuing it produces the kind of life worth living. Pragmatists assume that the world of experience, accessible to scientific inquiry, is all we can know. Propositions and acts have meaning only in terms of their verifiable public consequences.
Pragmatist philosophers saw little value in modes of thinking that did not somehow make a difference in daily life. They concluded that behaviour not based on thought was missing something important, and that thought disconnected from behaviour was equally suspect. The right approach was thought and action working together, with thought tested by the consequences of the action it informed.
The appropriate curriculum, on this view, prepares the student for life success and for improving society. It consists more in seeking solutions to problems than in subject mastery. The student learns by working on real problems, finding workable answers, testing the answers against reality, and improving on the basis of what works. This is a different vision of education from Adler’s slow careful reading of the great works.
Reality is changing, humans are researching beings, knowledge is verified by practical consequences
Pragmatists see reality as constantly changing rather than as a stable order. Humans are researching, verifying beings interacting with reality. Education is a process of learning to think critically and engage in problem-solving through the scientific method. Practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge, meaning, and value: a claim is true if it works. The world of experience, accessible to scientific inquiry, is all we can know.
If it works, use it; where there is a will, there is a way; results are what count; the test for truth is the individual
Four short maxims that capture the pragmatist temper. The truth of an idea is shown in whether acting on it produces the results it predicts. Persistence and effort find a path through obstacles that pure theory cannot map. Results, not intentions or theories, are the final standard. And the test of any claim is whether it works for the individual applying it in practice.
The philosophical position of pragmatism
The pragmatist worldview can be compressed into a few connected lines that capture the philosophical position.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Practical action finds paths that pure theory cannot map in advance.
Man’s time is best spent solving today’s problems. The pragmatist is uninterested in metaphysical questions whose answers cannot make a practical difference. The questions worth a thinker’s time are the questions whose answers shape what we should do.
The truth is what is practical, because the truth is what works. This is the pragmatist conception of truth in its most compressed form. An idea is true to the extent that acting on it works out. There is no other test.
Truth cannot be known in a closed system with any experience on the other side; therefore, truth is determined by experimentation. The only way to test a claim is to act on it and see what happens. Pure reasoning from premises cannot establish truth, because the premises themselves have to be tested against experience.
Cosmological reality has been undergoing change over the past centuries. Reality is not fixed, but is in a constant state of flux as man’s experience broadens. This is the pragmatist version of the older claim that the universe itself is in process rather than static. As human experience expands, the picture of reality changes; reality is not a fixed target the mind tries to hit but a moving subject the mind tracks.
The seeking of knowledge is a transaction between man and his environment. Knowing is not just inside the mind. It is an interaction between the knower and the world; the world contributes, the knower contributes, and knowledge is the product of the transaction.
For Adler, every one of these lines would have been a mistake. For Dewey, every one of these lines is a starting point. The next chapter takes up Dewey’s philosophy and shows what an education built on the pragmatist foundation actually looks like.
Truth is what works, tested by experimentation rather than by deduction from premises
The truth of an idea is shown in whether acting on it produces the results it predicts. Pure reasoning from premises cannot establish truth, because the premises themselves have to be tested against experience. The seeking of knowledge is a transaction between the knower and the environment; both contribute, and knowledge is the product of the transaction. Adler would have rejected this account of truth completely.
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