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Mortimer Adler, a recognised academic scholar from the University of Chicago, wrote a watershed piece on adult learning issues. Here are some profound discoveries that seem truer today for knowledge workers than ever before. These are direct, selected quotes. His main theme is the necessity for information to be best communicated by the original thinker... not a third party/proxy communicator (let alone a static digital database !).

Reading Standards

If the schools taught their pupils to read well, they would make students of them, and students they would be out of school and after it as well.

The better the reader, the closer they get to understanding the written matter as the masters have understood it.... Today there is declining literacy.

Evidence from the graduate and professional schools tends to show that, so far as reading for understanding is concerned, they are still sixth-graders. (P.70)

If the tests were more severe, the findings would be distressingly worse.

If...(recommended) requirements were incorporated into tests, and a satisfactory performance were the condition of graduation, not one in a hundred students now getting their diplomas each June would wear the cap and gown.

Causes to Deficiency

(Author Assumptions)...
Great books have been written on the assumption that their readers are thoroughly competent to read... they (authors) do not go in for spoon-feeding.

(Teacher Capabilities)...
The teacher was (once) primarily a man of knowledge, and a communicator secondarily... I mean, he had first to get knowledge by discovering it himself, before he could teach it to anyone else.

Today, the living teacher is primarily a man of learning, rather than a discoverer [major criticism].... either as a repeater or digester (summariser). In either case, his students could learn everything he knows by reading the books he has read.

(The original thinker)... happens rarely. Every now and then the graduate school is graced by a course of lectures which constitutes an original communication.

(Although)... complete originality is both impossible and misleading... the self-educated man is as rare as the self-made man. They have exceptional qualities of character - the stamina and the self-discipline, the patience and perserverance.

Alive or dead, the (repeater) teacher tries to import knowledge without requiring too much or too skillful activity on the part of the learner (student).

I am not denying that the great books are likely to require a more arduous and diligent effort than the digests... By my own standards of good reading, I do not think I have read many books. I have, of course, obtained information from a large number. But I have not struggled for enlightenment with many. The path to true learning is strewn with rocks, not roses.

(Reading) always was and still is the hardest work I do. I seldom do it inthe living room in an easy chair... I do it sitting up at my desk, and almost always with a pencil in hand and a pad at the side.

There should be some discernible product of your mental activity.

- DEBRIEF -

Adler spent 300 pages to get me to read better. That's how convicted he was about the falling literacy standards. And that was in 1940 in a First World country !

He came to these passionate conclusions because he saw his Arts students giving technically perfect answers to literary masterpieces but they showed little understanding of the higher meaning of the passages. They were regurgitating back to him what the passages in the book were saying without involving their own thinking and personal perspectives. This just shocked him. They knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing !

You cannot short cut profound learning, exhorts Mortimer Adler. Humans should be into profound learning not shallow survival skills.

Here is a similar example : The retiring Latin teacher of 20 years from Melbourne High School, Australia, lamented how his students have an efficiency mindset of dividing their homework time up between subjects ruthlessly. He can understand their dilemma. Student numbers for Latin are increasing but it is not leading to passion for the subject. At the end of the year his students get quite good grades on most subjects but NO PASSION for the subjects. You cannot develop passion for a subject by doing the barest minimum ! Students end up being grade achievers but indifferent to learning ! He seriously raises the issue of what type of students do we really want to produce ?

I have attended the equivalent of five full years of university to safely make the observation that few graduates completed their degrees for the love of it. In fact, the vast majority are to this day, I suggest, quite apathetic about the subjects and to learning as a whole ! Could it be we have started young people on the wrong assumptions of learning ?

One university lecturer in chemistry said to me how one minute he could be expounding on major truths on his passionate subject and then the next minute straight after class his students scramble for their mobile phones, seemingly unmoved by the foundational truths they have just been exposed to !

Could it also be that our role models... our teachers/lecturers/trainers... set a poor standard of personal passion for the subject that they cover ?

Knowledge management is all about on-the-job active and proactive learning. But if employees have a dysfunctional mindset and poor habits towards learning then no matter how good the 'system' is, the individual will NOT really learn. Agreed ?

Our education system has pointed us to the wrong destination - grades rather than passion. And companies continue to pay the price for this juvenile mindset... Managers rewarding staff for 'doing' not 'thinking' and staff oblige by rarely showing any individual creativity. No wonder visionaries like John Neisbitt (Megatrends) are proclaiming more vehemently than ever before that people "need to learn how they learn."

60 years on and what has our education system achieved ? Producing lifelong learners or grade achievers ?

Houston... we have a MAJOR problem.

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