The question at hand is whether or not Mortimer Adler was correct in asserting, “The best education for the best is the best education for all.” (He was actually quoting his colleague Robert Maynard Hutchins, mid-century president of the University of Chicago.) I will leave it to others to break down the “all” in the Adlerian proposition, that is, to discuss the importance and challenges of offering classical education to the beautiful diversity of students in American schools and indeed in schools around the world. Of course, even in writing that, I am tipping my hat as to my assessment of Adler’s claim. I think he was right. I think that all people deserve to read the best that has been written, spoken, and created throughout the course of human history, and this is true for every discipline, be it the fine arts, mathematics, literature, science, history, or philosophy.

    Rather than defending Adler directly, either wholesale or by choosing a particular group of students that might be proposed as a counterexample to his claim, I would like to defend a particular interpretation of the phrase “the best education … is the best education for all,” or alternatively, “classical education is for everybody.” I would like to offer that if this is true, then it must mean that students within a school should be guided through a core curricular program of formation that does not separate them off into tracks based on ability or interests. To be clear, and maybe to be provocative right off the bat, this not only means something like students all reading the same texts in a great books course, but it also means that they should not be tracked in their math classes. I offer three reasons for this: a metaphysical argument, an anthropological argument, and a psychological argument.

    First, if Adler is right about the best education being for everybody, then he must also be right that a best education exists. The heart of Adler’s statement is that all students deserve the best, and if two programs of formation differ in either content or speed, then they cannot both be the best. Of course, one might object that classical schools across the country have different curricula and different pedagogies from one another. True—but this in itself does not contradict the existence of a best model of education or a best choice of curricula. It only means that if two schools differ on a particular, one of them is correct and the other is not. Such a determination might be very difficult, and the leaders of the two schools will likely disagree. That is, after all, why they have made the decision they made. The case within as school is of a different sort. Under a single leader, the existence of something like math tracks or “honors” courses is an intentional admission of multiple programs into the life and culture of the school. To be clear, I am not necessarily claiming that the “lower” track is necessarily inferior. It may be, in fact, that it is the better formation of the two. I am only saying that, unlike the variations between schools in which the school leaders believe themselves to be offering the best, variation within a school is the knowing implementation of a non-best education.

    Second, the formation of the student can never be done outside of a community of learners. Man is a social being—to be fully human is to be in communion with other humans. In going through an educational program, students deserve to progress together in exploration, discovery, and conversation. When students are split up into groups based on ability, this communicates that there are at least two, sometimes more, communities in the school. In this way, and to use an already over-played biblical metaphor, students are indeed their brothers’ keepers. It is the responsibility of each child in the classroom to take ownership not only of his or her own learning but also that of the entire class.

    Third, when we separate students by ability, we communicate to them that there are “haves” and “have-nots” at least within the particular discipline undergoing the grouping. We tell students that some of them are “good at math” and others are “not good at math.” What’s more, these labels tend to stick. While the research on the effectiveness of ability grouping seems to be mixed, the research on the effect this has on students’ hearts and minds is not. Students in the lower group tend to think that it is part of their anthropological makeup to not be good at math, and because of this, rare is the student that ends up “jumping tracks.” Alternatively, we tell the students in the higher group the same thing—that their math talents are a result of who they are rather than academic curiosity and hard work. Carol Dweck has shown that in general this leads to students being risk averse. Both sets of students come to think of math as something that is for some people and not for others rather than something that, as my good friend Mike Austin says, uniquely satisfies the human soul.

    This is not to suggest that a core curricular formation for all students within a school is without challenges. Many a teacher has struggled with how to educate a mixed-ability classroom. However, these difficulties should not cause us to back off from the principle that “the best education for the best is the best education for all” and that “the best education” actually exists in all of its particularities. More attention needs to be given to how to accomplish this day-in and day-out. It could also be that the seemingly overwhelming challenge points to a need to rethink how we approach the discipline itself. That, however, will have to wait for a further Disputed Question.

Jake Tawney
Vice President of Curriculum for Great Hearts Academies

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