Adlerama Finale

It's been a long bumpy road, but I'm ready to close out the Malcolm Adler trip I started earlier this year. Today, I read the introduction to the "original" Great Books of The Western World, as opposed to the Gateway set I did earlier. (Technically, the GB intro isn't written by Adler, and I'm not sure about the GW one. Maybe I should've called this whole thing a GBotWW project with some Adler detours.) It's much better. GW crammed together a what, why, and how of Liberal/Classical Education with a summary of history's progress in various areas. GB focuses almost exclusively on what and why.

I think, in the end, what I really want from these is:

1. What is a Classical/Liberal Education?

2. Why should I care?

3. How do I get it (and why is it by reading?)

4. How do I read effectively?

1 and 2 are probably best answered by the GB introduction. 4 by "How to Mark Up a Book." 3 is handled reasonably well in several of the texts.

As an aside, it's a real shame that Adler and the Britannica team seemed to regard the Gateway set, at best, as a companion/children's version of the "real" Great Books and, less charitably, as an advertisement for it. The full Great Books, like the Harvard Classics, is massive, unwieldy, and intimidating. 54 (later 60) big thick hard covers of tiny type. The suggested reading plan spans 10 years, with hundreds of pages of material from the core set, plus exterior supplementary readings each year. I think there's a real value in a smaller set, of mostly smaller works, for someone who wants to start on C/L Education, or who doesn't have a 5+ foot book shelf available for them. Digital helps, which I'll get around to.

But to answer the four questions above, the best combination of it all is the introductory chapters of How to Read a Book. Those 60 odd pages fairly effectively lay out why you should want a C/L Education, how it differs from a "regular" (vocational) school education, what good reading looks like, how and why reading is an effective educational tool, and the basic skills of effective reading (skimming, marking a book, etc.) Most of that's available in the Amazon preview, but you could yar har yourself a copy if you want. Or just buy the actual book.

Which brings me to a couple thoughts on my reading/blogging as a whole.

I've read for this blog primarily in three different formats:

1. Physical (either print outs or actual books)
2. Digital minimally editable (pdfs, web pages, etc.)

3. Physically easily editable (mostly in Google Docs)

By far, I prefer the third for most readings. It's easy for me to leave as many comments as I want, I can highlight, bold, etc. if I want to mark something but not comment, I can add bookmarks and links to articles... 

Physical is probably better for really deep stuff, but the logistics and effort is way higher. Get the book, keep notes, find somewhere to put them, find the book and flip through (vs searching in my drive and ctrl+f) when I need to look back later, etc. Physical is more flexible, and probably better for my recalls, but it's probably like double the work for a ten percent increase (wildly estimating here). 

So, I think that will be my focus moving forward, trying to mostly read stuff I can get into a doc and poke at. There's still some logistical concerns (not everything is available in an appropriate format, I'll need to learn how to extract text from some things, working with larger docs, possible legal issues if I share them with you all), but I think that's my favorite.

I've got a couple other "small" entries to do over the next couple days, and then an inkling of my next project (which will probably relate to the above musings). Keep reading!