Foundation: How to Speak, How to Listen

“How to Speak, How to Listen”
Mortimer Adler


How to Speak, How to Listen: 16 pages, 9,260 words, visuals

Chapter 1:
How to Speak, How to Listen
How do you make contact with the mind of another person?
In what way should that other person responds to your effort?



What makes these things so amazing and extraordinary is the fact that the two generally untaught skills, speaking and listening, are much more difficult to acquire and more difficult to teach than the parallel skills of writing and reading.

In the centuries before Gutenberg and the printing press, speaking and listening played a much larger part in anyone’s education than writing and reading. That had to be, because, in the absence of the printed page and with written books available only to the very few, those who had some kind of schooling— either by individual pedagogues, in the academies of the ancient world, or in the mediaeval universities— were compelled to learn by listening to what their teachers said.
As the etymology of the word “lecture” indicates, lecturing consisted in reading a text aloud, accompanied by a running commentary on the text read.