HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  It could. If somehow out of school and after it, people generally could get some of the education they did not get in school, they might be motivated, as they are not now, to blow up the school system. And they could get the education they did not get, if they could read. Do you follow this reasoning? The vicious circle would be broken if the general public were better educated than the standard product of the schools and colleges. It would break at the point where they would really know themselves the kind of literacy they would like their children to get. All the regular flimflam handed out by the educators could not talk them out it.

  No one can be taught reading, or any ather skill for that matter, who will not help himself. The help I, or anyone like me, may offer is insufficient. It is at best remote guidance. It consists of rules, examples, advice of all sorts. But you have to be willing to take advie and to follow rules. You can get no further than you take yourself. Hence, my diabolical plan will not work without your co-opeation in its early stages. Once I got you started reading, I would let nature take its course, and be fairly condifent about the ultimate outcome.

  I have a deep conviction that anyone who has had even a memorable taste of the kind of education. Mr. Hutchins is fighting for, and St. John's is trying to give, would want it for others. Certainly, he would want it for his children. It is not paradoxical that the most violent opposion to the program comes from professional educators who seem to have been least touched in their own lives by this type of education.

  More than educational reform is at stake. Democracy and the liberal institutions we have cherished in this country since its founding are in the balance, too. When Mr.

  Walter Lippmann first discovered a book on the Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic, he was surprised that "the men who had made the modern world should have been educated in this old-fashioned way." The old-fashioned way is the way of arts of reading and writing, the way of reading the great books.

  Mr. Lippmann, who passed through Harvard very creditably, attributed his surprise to the fact that he had, naturally, enough, never challenged the standards of his generation.

  It must be said in his behalf, however, that since leaving Harvard he has read a great many books. That has some bearing on his insight:

  I began to think that perhaps it was very significant that men so educated had founded our liberties, and that we who are not so educated should be mismanaging our liberties and be in danger of losing them.

  Gradually I have come to believe that this fact is the main clue the the riddle of our epoch, and that men are ceasing to be fre because they are no longer being educated in the arts of free men.

  Do you see why I think there is dynamite in reading, not only enough to blow the school system but enough to furnish the arsenal for the protection of our liberties?

  - 2 -

  I have hesitated some time before talking about self-help. In fact, I have hesitated some time about writing this book, because I have what is, perhaps, an irrational prejudice against self-help books. They have always sounded like patent-medicine advertisements to me. If only you will take this or that in small, regular doses, you will be cured of all your ills. The world will be saved. This means you. It all depends on you. In my academic serenity, I was once above and apart from such tawdry devices. When you write for your scholarly peers, you do not make such appeals, probably beause you would never think of expecting them to help themselves.

  Two things have brought me down form the tower. In the first place, it may be serene up there, but after your eyes have been opened to the sham and the delusion which perpetuate the serenity, it seems more like the stillness that sometimes pervades a madhouse. In the second place, I have seen the fruits of adult education. It can be done.

  And anyone who has worked in adult education knows that he must appeal for self-help.

  There are no monitors to keep adults at the task. There are no examinations and grades, none of the machinery of external discipline. The person who learns something out of school is self-disciplined. He works for merit in his own eyes, not credit from the registrar.

  There is only one caution I must add to keep the proceedings honest. Those self-help books which promise to do more than they can are bogus. No book, as I have said before, can direct you in the acquisition of a skill with as much efficiency as the tutor or coach who takes you by the hand and leads you through the motions.

  Let me state now, simply and briefly, the conditions under which you can effectively help yourself. Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operaitng according to its rules. In fact, the artist or craftsman in any field differs thus from those who lack his skill. He has a habit they lack. You know wht I mean by habit here. I do not mean drug addition. Your skill in playing golf or tennis, your technique in driving a car or cooking soup, is a habit. You acquired it by performing the acts which constitute the whole operation.

  There is no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating. That is what it means to say one learns to do by doing. The difference between your activity before and after you have formed a habit is a difference in facility and readiness. You can do the same thing much better than when you started. That is what it meants to say practice makes perfect. What you do very imperfectly at first you gradually come to do with the kind of almost automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were to the manner born, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is the second nature.

  One thing is clear. Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit. When we speak of a man as skilled in any way, we do not mean that he knows the rules of doing something, but that he possesses the habit of doing it. Of course, it is true that knowing the rules, more or less explicitly, is a condition of getting the skill. You cannot follow rules you do not know. Nor can you acquire an atristic habit—any craft or skill—

  without following rules. the art as something which can be taught consists of rules to be followed in operation. The art as something which can be learned and possessed consists of the habit which results from operating according to the rules.

  Everything I have said so far about the acquisition of skill applies to the art of reading.

  But there is one difference between reading and certain other skills. To acquire any art yiou must know the rules in order to follow them. But yoy need not in every case understand the rules, or at least nor to the same degree. Thus, in learning to drive an automobile, you must know the rules but you do not have to know the principles of automotive mechanics which make them right. In other words, to understand the rules is to know more than the rules. It is to know the scientific principles which underlie them. If you wanted to be able to repair your car as well as drive it, you would have to know its mechanical principles, and you would under the rules of driving better than most drivers do. If understanding the rules were part of the test for driver's license, the automobile industry would suffer a depression that would make the last one look like a boom.

  The reasons for this difference between reading and driving is that the one more of an intellectuall, the other more of a mannual, art. All rules of art engage the mind in the activity they govern, of course; but the activity may not be principally an activity of the mind itself, as reading is. Reading, and writing, scientific research and musical composition, are intellectual arts. That is why it is more necessary for their practitioners not only to know the rules but to find them intelligible.

  It is more necessary, but it is not absolutely indispensable. It might be more accurate to say that it is a matter of degree. You must have some understanding of the rules of reading, if you are to form the the habit of this intellectual operation intelligently. but you need not understand them perfectly. If complete understanding were essential, this book would be a hoax. To understand the rules of reading perfectly, you would have to know the sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and lo
gic with consummmate adequacy. Just as the science of automotive mechanics underlies the rules for driving and repairing cars, so the liberal sciences I have just named underlie the rules of liberal art which govern such things reading and writing.

  You may have observed that sometimes I speak of the arts of reading and writings as liberal arts, and sometimes I say the liberal arts are grammar, rhetoric, and logic. In the former case, I am referring to the operations which the rules direct us in performing well; in the latter, I am referring to the rules themselves which govern such operations.

  Further more, the fact that grammar and logic are sometimes regarded as science and sometimes as arts means that the rules of operation, which the arts prescribe, can be made intelligible by principles underlying the rules, which the science didscuss.

  It would take a book ten times as long as this one to expound the sciences which makes the rules of reading and writing intelligible. If you started to study the sciences for the sake ultimately of understanding the rules and forming the habits, you might never get to the rules or form the habits. That is what happens to many logicians and grammarians who have spent their lives studying the sciences. They do not learn how to read and write. That is why courses in logic as a science, even if they were required of all college students, would not do the trick. I have met many students who have spent years of genuine devotion to the science of logic who could not read and write very well; in fact, did not even know the rules of the art, not to mention the habit of good performance according the rules.

  The solution of this riddle is indicated. We shall begin with the rules—the precepts which are most directly and intimately regulative of the acts you must perform to read well. I shall try to make the rules as intelligible as possible in a brief discussion, but I shall not go into the intricacies and subtleties of scientific grammar or logic. Suffice it if you realize that there is much more to know about the rules than you are learning from this book, and that the more you know of their underlying principles, the better you will understand them. Perhaps, if you learn to read by reading this book, you will be able to later to read books about the sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

  I am satisfied that this is a sound procedure. It might not be generally so, but it must be so in the case of reading. If you do not know how to read very well to begin with, you cannot learn how by starting with scientific books about grammar and logic, because you cannot read them well enough either to udnerstand them in themselves or to make practical applications of them by formulating rules of operation for yourself. Getting this aspect of our undertaking clear removes another possibility of dishonesty or pretension. I shall always try to tell you if my explanation of a rule is superficial or inadequate, as necessarily some of them will be.

  I must caution you against one other thing. You will not learn to read just by reading this, any more than you can learn to drive a car by perusing a driver's maual. You under, I am sure, the point about the necessity of practice. you may think that you can start right off in this business of reading, as soon as you know the rules. If you think so, you are going to be disappointed. I want to prevent that because such frustrations may lead you to abandon the whold enterprise in despair.

  Do not take the list of rules in one hand, and a book to be read in the other, and try to perform at once as if you possessed the skill habitually. That would be as dangerous to your mental health as getting into an auto for the first time, with the wheel in one hand and a driving manual in the other, would be to your physical well-being. In both cases, an operation which is at first clumsy, disconnected, tedious, and painful becomes graceful and smooth, facile and pleasant, only through many hours of practice. If at first you do not succeed, the rewards of practice should induce you try again. Mr. Aaron Copland recently wrote a book on What to Listen for in Music. In its opening paragraph, he wrote:

  All books on understanding music are agreed about one point: You can't develop a better appreciation of the art merely by reading a book about it. If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than listen to it. Nothing can possibily take the place of listening to music. Everything that I have to say in this book is said about an experience that you can only get outside this book.

  Therefore, you will probably be wasting your time in reading it unless you make a firm resolve to hear a great deal more music than you have in the past. All of us, professionals and nonprofessionals, are forever trying to deepen our understanding of the art. Rreading a book may sometimes help us. But nothing can replace the prime consideration—listen to music itself.

  Substitue the word "books" for "music," and "reading" for "listening," and you have the first and last word of advice about how to use the rules I am going to discuss. Learning the rules may help, but nothing can replace the prime consideration, which is reading books.

  You may ask: How will I know whether I am really following the rules when I read?

  How can I tell whether I am really making the right amount of effort toget cut of the rut of passive and sloppy reading? What are the signs which indicate that I am making progress toward reading more intelligently?

  There are many ways of answering such questions. For one thing, you should be able to tell whether you are getting the lift which comes from managing to understanding something which at first seemed unintelligible to you. For another, if you know the rules, you can always check your readings as one checks back on the sum of a column of figures. How many of the steps, which the rules prescribe, have you taken? You can measure your achievement in terms of the techniques you should have used to operate upoon a book better than yourself, whereby to elevate yourself to its level.

  The most direct sign that you have done the work of reading is fatigue. Reading that is reading entails the most intense mental activity. It you are not tired out, you probably have not been doing the work. Far from being passive and relaxing, I have always found what litle reading I have done the most arduous and active occupation. I often cannot read more than a few hours at a timne, and I seldom read much in that time. I usually find it hard work and slow work. There may be people who can read quickly and well, but I am not one of them. The point about speed is irrelevant. What is relevant is activity. To read books passively does not feed a mind. It makes blotting paper out of it.

  - 3 -

  By my own standards or 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 struggle for enlightment with many. I have reread some of those quite often, but that is somewhat easier than the original reading. Perhaps you will get my point if I tell you that now I probably do not read to understand more than ten books a year—that is, books I have not read before. I haven't the time I once had. It always was and still is the hardest work I do. I seldom do it in the living room in an easy chair, largely for fear of being seduced into relaxation and eventually sleep. I d it sitting up at my desk, and almost always with a pencil in hand and a pad at the side.

  That suggests another sign by which do tell whether you are doing the job of reading.

  Not only should it tire you, but there should be some discernible product of your memtal activity. Thinking usually tends to express itself overtly in language. One tends to verbalize ideas, questions, difficulties, judgements that occur in the course of thinking. If you have been reading, you must have been thinking; you have something you can express in words. One of the reasons why I find reading a slow process is that I keep a record of the little thing I do. I cannot go on reading the next page, if I do not make a memo of something which occurred to me in reading this one.

  Some people are able to use their memory in such a way that they need not bother with notes. Again, this is a matter of individual differences. I find it more efficient not to burden my memory while reading and to use the margins of the book or a jot a pad instead. The work of memory can be undertaken later and, of course, should be. But I find it easier not to let it inter
fere with the work of understanding which constitutes the main task of reading. If you are like me—rather than like thos who can keep on reading and remembering at the same time—you will be able to tell whether you have been reading actively by your pencil and paper work.

  Some people enjoy making notes on the back cover or the end papers of a book. They find, as I do, that this often saves them the trouble of an extra reading to rediscover the main points they had intended to remember. Marking a book or writing on its end papers may make you more reluctant to lend your books. They have become documents in your intellectual autobiography, and you may not wish t trust such records to any except the best of friends. I seldom feel like confessing so much about myself even to friends. But the business of making notes while reading is so important that you should not be deterred from writing in a book by the possible social consequences.

  If for the reason mention, or some other, you have prejudices against marking up a book, use a pad. If you read a borrowed book, you have to use a pad. Then there is theproblem of keeping your notes for future reference, on the assumption, of course, that you have made a significant record of your reading. I find writing in the book itself the most efficient and satisfying procedure during a first reading, although it is often necessary later to make extensive notes on separate sheets of paper. The later procedure is indispensable if your are organizing a fairly elaborate summary of the book.

  Whatever procedure you choosem you can measure yourself as a reader by examining what you have produced in notes during the course of reading a book. Do not forget, here as elsewhere, that theer is something more important than quantity. Just as there is reading and reading, so there is note taking and note taking. I am not recommending the kind of notes most students take during a lecture. There is no record of thought in them.