How to read a book

I would say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a democracy than in other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate. 

In their false liberalism, the progressive educators confused discipline with regimentation, and forgot that true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline. A disciplined mind, trained in the power of thought, is one which can read and write critically, as well as do efficient work in discovery. (Pages 81-82)

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There is a lot of talk today, among liberal educators who fear the rise of fascism, about the dangers of regimentation and indoctrination. I have already pointed out that many of them confuse discipline with Prussian drill and the goose step (military march). They confuse authority, which is nothing but the voice of reason, with autocracy or tyranny. But the error they make about indoctrination is the saddest. They, and most of us, do not know what docility is.

To be docile is to be teachable. To be teachable one must have the art of being taught and must practice it actively. The more active one is in learning from a teacher, dead or alive ("dead" teacher: book), and the more art one uses to master what he has to teach, the more docile one is. Docility, in short, is the precise opposite of passivity or gullibility. Those who lack docility - the students who fall asleep during a class - are the most likely to be indoctrinated. Lacking the art of being taught, whether that be skill in listening or in reading, they do not know how to be active in receiving what is communicated to them. Hence, they either receive nothing at all or what they receive they absorb uncritically.

Slighting the three R's in the beginning (3 R's: reading, writing and reckon/fail of primary school/fail of school system), and neglecting the liberal arts (liberal arts: grammar, logic and rhetoric) almost entirely at the end, our present education is essentially illiberal. It indoctrinates rather than disciplines and educates. Our students are indoctrinated with all sorts of local prejudices and predigested pap. 

Even when the doctrines they impose are sound democratic ones, the school fail to cultivate free judgement because they have forsaken discipline. They leave their students open to opposite indoctrination by more powerful orators or, what is worse, to the sway of they own worst passions.

Ours is a demagogic rather than a democratic education. The student who has not learned to think critically, who has not come to respect reason as the only arbiter of truth in human generalization, who was not been lifted out of the blind alleys of local jargons and shibboleths, will not be saved by the orator of the classroom from later succumbing to the orator of the platform and the press. (Pages 99-100)

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Clarissa Lake - Mortimer J. Adler: How to read a book, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1940 - Parentheses are some of my notes