A Guidebook to Learning by Mortimer J. Adler
A map of sorts for people who want to plan out a lifetime of learning to help them to navigate the plethora of
information.
I do not know what I thought this book would be, but it
wasn’t what I got. Even the author
admits that if you get through most of the book and make it to the final
chapters you might wonder what everything you have read so far has to do with
the proposed goal of the book. I was in
that position myself. Which is not to
say that there was nothing I found interesting there. Adler goes through a historical survey of how
information has been organized and collected.
He also outlines the reasons why alphabetical order is not the best way
to organize information and the reasons it is so hard to organize it any other
way. Some of which was interesting for
its own sake. But it isn’t for
everyone. I can see how some people
would be bored to tears. I have never
read anything else by Adler but he talked about his other work a lot. So much that it started to feel
self-promoting at times. He explains
that he thinks everyone should have a general education and gives you some tips
on how to go about giving yourself one along with an outline of information to
give you some place to start and something to aim for.
