HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  In short, we can learn only from our betters. We must know who they are and how to learn from them. The man who has this sort ofknowledge possesses the art of reading in the sense with which I am specially concerned. Every one probably has some ability to read in this way. But all of us gain more by our efforts through applying them to more rewarding materials.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Reading is Learning

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  ONE rule of reading, as you have seen, is to pick out and interpret the important words in a book. There is another and closely related rule: to discover the important sentences and to understand what they mean.

  The words "reading is learning" make a sentence. That sentence is obviously important for this discussion. Infact, I would say that it is the most important sentence so far. Its importance is indicated by the weightiness of the words which compose it. They are not important words but also ambiguous ones, as we have seen in the case of "reading."

  Now, if the word "reading" has meanings, and similarly the word "learning," and if that little word "is" takes the prize for ambiguity, you are in no position to affirm or deny the sentence. It means a number of things, some of which may be true and some false.

  When you have found out the meaning of each of the three words, as I have used them, you will have discovered the proposition I am trying to convey. Then, and only then, can you decide whether you agree with me.

  Since you know that we are not going to consider reading for amusement, you might charge me with inaccuracy for not having said: " Some reading is learning." My defense is on which you as a reader will soon come to anticipate. The context made it unnecessary for me to say "some." It was understood that we we going to ignore reading for amusement.

  To interpret the sentence, we must first ask: What os learning? Obviously, we cannot discuss learning adequately here. The only brief way out is to make a rough a approximation in terms of what everybody knows: that learning is acquiring knowledge.

  Don't run away. I am not going to define "knowledge." If I tried to do that, we would be swamped by the number of other words which would suddenly become inportant and demamd explication. For our purposes your present understanding of "knowledge" is sufficient. You have knowledge. You know that you know and what you know. You know the diffenence between knowing and not knowing something.

  If you were called upon to give a philosophical account of the nature of knowledge, you might be stumped; but so have many philosophers been. Let us leave them to their worries, and proceed to ue the word "knowledge" on the assumptiion that we understand each other. But, you may onject, even if we assume that we have a sufficient grasp of what we mean by "knowledge,"there are other difficulties in saying that learning is acquiring knowledge. One learns how to play tennis or cook. Playing tennis and cooking are now knowledge. They are ways of doing something which require skill.

  The objection has point. Although knowledge is involved in every skill, having a skill is having something more than knowledge. The person who has skill not only knows something but can do something which the person lacking it cannot do at all or as well.

  There is a familiar distinction here, which all of us make when we speak of knowing how(to do something) as opposed to knowing that (something is the case). One can learn how as well as that. You have already acknowledged this distinction in recognizing that one has to learn how to read in order to learn from reading.

  An initial restriction is thus imposed on the word "learning" as we are using it. Reading is learning only in the sense of gaining knowledge and not the skill. You cannot learn how to read just by reading this book. All you can learn is the nature of reading and the rules of the art. That may help you learn how to read, but it is not sufficient. I addition, you must follow the rules and practice the art. Only in that way can the skill be required, which is something over and above the knowledge that a mere book can communicate.

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  So far, so good. But now we must turn to the distinctioin between reading for information and reading ro understanding. In the preceding chapter, I suggested how much more active the ltter sort of reading must be, and how it feels to do it. Now we must consider the difference in what you get out of these two kinds of reading. Both information and understanding are knowledge in some sense. Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understanding what you did not understand before.

  What is the difference?

  To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same and different, and so forth.

  Most of us are acquainted with this distinction in terms of the difference between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or the world, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. Yo have not been enlightened. That happens only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

  A single example may help us here. What I am going to report happened in a class in which we were reading Thomas Aqhinas's treatise on the passions, but the same thing has happened in countless other classes with many different sorts of material. I asked a student what St. Thomas had to say about the order of the passions. H e quite correctly told me that love, according to St. Thomas, is the first of all the passions and that the other emotions, which he named accurately, follow in a certain order. Then I asked him what it meant to say this. He looked startled. Had he not answered my question correctly? I told him he had, but repeated my request for an explanation. He had told me what St. Thomas said. Now I wanted to know what St. Thomas meant. The student tried, but all he could do was to repeat, in slightly altered order, the same words he had used to answer my original question. It soon became obvious that he did not know what he was talking about, even though he would have made a good score on any examination which went no further than my original questions or questions of a similar sort.

  I tried to help him. I asked him whether love was first in the sense of being a cause of other emotions. I asked him how hate and anger, hope and fear, depended on love. I asked him about the relations of joy and grief to love. And what is love? Is love hunger for food and thirst for drink, or is it only what wonderful feeling which is supposed to make the world go round? Is the desire for money of fame, knowledge or happiness, love? In so far as he could answer these questions by repeating more or less accurately the words of St. Thomas, he did. When he made errors in reporting, other members of the class could make any headway with explaining what it was all about.

  I still tried another tack. I asked them, begging their pardon, about their own emotional experience. They were all old enough to have had a few passions. Did they ever hate anybody, and did it have anything to do with loving that person or somebody else? Had they ever experience a sequence of emotions, one of which somehow led into another?

  They were very vague, not because they were embarassed or because they had never been emotionally upset but because they totally unaccustomed to thinking about their experience in this way. Clearly they had not made any connection between the words they had read in a book about the passions and their own experiences. These things were as in worlds apart.

  It was becoming apparent why they did not have the faintest understanding of what they had read. It was just words they had memorized to be able to repeat somehow when I shot an question at them. That was what they did in other courses. I was asking too much of them.

  I still persisted. Perhaps, if they could not understand Aquinas in the light of their own experience, they might be able to use the vicarious experience they got from reading novels. They had read some fiction. Here and there some of them had even a great novel. Did pa
ssions occur in these stories? Were there different passions and how were they related? They did as badly here as before. They answered by telling me the story in a superficial summary of the plot. They understood the novels they had read about as little as they understood St. Thomas.

  Finally, I asked whether they had ever taken any other courses in which passions or emotions had been discussed. Most of them had had an elementary course in psychology, and one or two of them had even heard of Freud, and perhaps read a little of him. When I discovered that they had made no connection whatsoever between the physiology of emotion, in which they had probably passed creditable examinations, and the passions as St. Thomas discussed them; when I found out they could not even see that St. Thomas was making the same basic point as Freud, I realized what I was up against.

  These students were college juniors and seniors. They could read in one sense but not in another. All their years in school they had been reading for information only, the sort of information you have to get from something assigned in order to answer quizzes and examinations. They never connected one book with another, one course with another, or anything that was said in books or lectures with what happened to them in their own lives.

  Not knowing that there was something more to do with a book than commit its more obvious statements to memory, they were totally innocent of their dismal failure when they came to class. According to their lights, they had conscientiously prepared the day's lesson. It had never occured to them they might be called upon to show that they understood what they had read. Even when a number of such class sessions began to make them aware of this novel requirement, they were helpless. At best they became a little more aware that they did not understand what they were reading , but they could do little about it. Here, near the end of their schooling, they were totally unskilled in the art of reading to understand.

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  When we read for information, we require facts.When we read to understand, we learn not only facts but their significance. Each kind of reading has its virtue, but it must be used in the right place. If a writer does not understand more than we do, or if in particular passage he makes no effort to explain, we can only informed by him, not enlightened. But if an author has insights we do not possess and if, in addition, he has tried to convey them in what he has written, we are neglecting his gift to us if we do not read him differently from the way in which we read newspapers or magazines.

  The books we acknowledge to be great or good are usually those which deserve the better sort of reading. It is true, of course, that anything can be read for informational as well as understanding. One should be able to remember what the author said as well ass know what he meant. In a sense, being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened.

  The point, however, is not to stop at being informed. It is as wasteful to read a great book solely for information as to use a fountain pen for digging worms.

  Montaigne speaks of "an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it." The one is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC's, cannot read at all. The other is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Pope rightly calls them, bookful of blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such mixture of learning and folly, which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

  Being well read too often means the quantity, too seldom the quality, of reading. It was not only the pessimistic and misanthropic Schopenhauer who inveighed against too much reading, because the found that, for the most part, men read passively and glutted themselves with toxic overdoses of unassimilated information. Bacon and Hobbes made the same point. Hobbes said: "If I read as many books as most men"—he meant

  "misread"—"I should be as dull-witted as they." Bacon distinguished between "books to be tasted, others to be swalled, and some few to be digested." The point that remains the same throughout rest on the distinction between different kinds of reading appropriate to different kinds of literature.

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  We have made some progress in interpreting the sentence "reading is learning." We know that some, but not all, learning can be achieved through reading: the acquisition of knowledge but not of skill. If we concluded, however, that the kind of reading which results in increased information or understanding is identical with the kind of learning which results in more knowledge, we would be making a serious error. We would be saying that no one can acquire knowledge except through reading, which is clearly false.

  To avoid this error, we must now consider one further distinction in types of learning.

  This distinction has a significant bearing on the whole business of reading, and its relation to education generally. (If the point I am now going to make is unfamiliar to you, and perhaps somewhat difficult, I sugget that you take the following pages as a challenge to your skill in reading. This is a good place to begin active reading—marking the important words, noting the distinctions, seeing how the meaning of the sentence with which we started expands.

  In the history of education, men have always distinguished between instruction and discovery as sources of knowledge. Instruction occurs when one man teachers another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he inturn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.

  Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on the one who learns. It would be a great mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive.

  There is no passive leraning, as there is no complete passive reading.

  The difference between the two activities of learning is with respect to the materials on which the learner works. When he is being taught or instructed, the learner acts on something communicated to him. He performs operations on discourse, written or oral.

  He learns by acts of reading or listening. Note here the close relation between reading and listening. If we ignore the mimor differences between these two ways of receiving communication, we can say that reading and listening are the same art—the art of being taught. When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature rather than discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of discovery. If we use the word "reading" loosely, we can say that discovery is the art of reading nature, as instruction (being taught) is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.

  What about thinking? If by "thinking" we mean the use of our minds to gain knowledge, and if instruction and discovery exhaust the ways of gaining knowledge, then clearly all our thinking must take place during one or the other of these two activities. We must think during the course of reading and listening, just as we must think in the course of research. Naturally, the kinds of thinking are different—as different as the two ways of learning are.

  The reason why many people regard thinking as more closely associated with research and discovery than with being taught is that they suppose reading and listening to be passive affairs. It is probably true that one does less thinking when one reads for information than when one is undertaking to discover something. That is the less active sort of reading. But it is not true of the more active reading—the effort to understand.

  No one who has done this sort of reading would say it can be done thoughtlessly.

  Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one's senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities
in the process of research or discovery and to forget or minize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening. A moment's reflection will show that the sensitive as well as the rational powers, in short, includes all the same skills that are involved in the art of discovery: kenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, a reason trained in anaysis and reflection. Though in general the skills are the same, they may be differently employed in the two major types of learning.

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  I would like to stress again the two errors which are so frequently made. One is made by those who write or talk about an art of thinking as if there were any such thing in and by itself. Since we never think apart from the work of being taught or the process of research, there is no art of thinking apart from the art of reading and listening, on the one hand, the art of discovery, on the other. To whatever extent it is true that reading is learning, it is also trye that reading is thinking. A complete account of the art of thinking can be given only in the context of a complete analysis of reading and research.

  The other error is made by those who write about the art of thinking as if it were identical with art of discovery. The outstanding example of this error, and one which has tremendously influenced American education, is John Dewey's How We Think. This book has been the bible for thousands of teachers who have been trained in our schools of education. Professor Dewey limits his discussion of thinking to its occurrence in learning by discovery. But that is only one of the two main ways we think. It is equally important to know how we think when we read a book or listen to a lecture. Perhaps, it is even more important for teachers who are engaged in instruction, since the art of reading must be related to the art of being taught, as the art of writing is related to the art of reading. I doubt whether anyone who does not know how to read well can write well. I similarly doubt whether anyone who does not have the art of being taught is skilled in teaching.