A Guidebook to Learning Review

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.