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- Dec 2024
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the news. It is therefore ironic that the present Life feature ... shouldhave so mortician-like an air – as though Professor Adler and hisassociates had come to bury and not to praise Plato and other greatmen.The ‘great ideas’ whose headstones are alphabetically displayedabove the coffin-like filing boxes have been extracted from the greatbooks in order to provide an index tool for manipulating the booksthemselves. By means of this index the books are made ready forimmediate use. May we not ask how this approach to the content andconditions of human thought differs from any other merely verbaland mechanized education in our time?
A young man named Marshall McLuhan, having glimpsed the photo shoot in Life, wrote with scathing insight in his first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951):
The services of Dr. Hutchins and Professor Adler to education are justly celebrated. They have by their enthusiasm put education in
McLuhan analogizes the tabbed dividers of a card index to tombstones and the card indexes to coffins!
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