Summary Of Bloom's Teachings

Bloom argues that the social and political crisis of twentieth century America is really a crisis. Bloom blamed high technology, the sexual revolution, music, and the introduction of cultural diversity into the curriculum as the problem. He thinks this is led to the production of students without wisdom or values. According to Bloom, American democracy has led to the demise of morals.
He stated that students these days are in general nice but are not moral or noble.” He attributes these feelings to moral relativism, instant gratification, and the poverty of the students’ education The American mind is closed because in advocating the value relativism, people are open to anything and everything, a move which enslaves us to the particular. He also
belives that America is too open today and that there is a need for a reinvention of the universities. He believed that universities chose whatever was popular and easy to understand in society currently as the curriculum for the university. Bloom also referred to an openness to study historical and cultural texts and materials in their original form, and be open to develop one’s own thoughts from them rather than accepting them at first glance with the opinions of so-called experts in the field of their textbooks. He suggested that in order to re-invigorate college and university curriculum the universities must return to the use of original texts and materials. For example, one should study Dante’s Inferno rather than a synopsis of classical poem modern classic, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with an observation of a trend that was all-too-common in the 1980s, but which has only solidified by 2010—namely, that students “are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality” (25). Bloom's concern goes beyond the obvious logical problems in relativism to a deeper issue, which is that students no longer come to the university with any hope to learn about what that is true, noble, or beautiful, because they do not believe that somethingcould be truer, more noble, or more beautiful than another. Bloom's goal, then, is to restore the university to its original task: teaching students both to ask and to begin to answer life's biggest questions by a thorough education in the classics.
Bloom structures his book into three sections. In the first, he explores the current state of university students, including how students no longer genuinely love to read good books as well as how their music has become distractingly sexual (both in lyrics as well as in rhythm), thus short-circuiting any desire for what good books might offer instead. Bloom closes the section on students by depicting the shallow, selfish, and individualistic relationships that students hold, arguing that students struggle in their relationships because they do not have wise guides in good books to suggest better ways to live.
In the second section, “Nihilism, American Style,” Bloom carefully walks his readers through the massive upheaval in European philosophy (which then found its way into American philosophy) that led to a complete rejection of the polar concepts of good and evil, truth and falsehood. For example, Bloom offers an intriguing take on Nietzsche: “'God is dead,' Nietsche proclaimed. But he did not say this on a note of triumph, in the style of earlier atheism—the tyrant has been overthrown and man is now free. Rather he said it in the anguished tones of the most powerful and delicate piety deprived of its proper object. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and Savior without possibility of resurrection. The joy of liberation one finds in Marx has turned into terror at man's unprotectedness” (195). While Bloom does not see the solution to the problem in Christianity, he seems to have a respect for those who reject the vanity of modernity and the despair of postmodernity through faith in the revelation of the ancient Bible.
In the third section, Bloom indicts the university for aiding and abetting students in their ignorance. The opposite of this laxity is Socrates, one of Bloom's heroes, who stood boldly against the Athenian powers-that-be to assert his intellectual convictions. In this section, Bloom examines the history of how the university began well (if one considers Socrates the beginning of the university), but slowly pulled out the thread that held its integrity together: genuine academic freedom.
Bloom demonstrates the Left have sought to destroy academic freedom in the 20th century when universities capitulated to the demands of violent student uprisings in the 1960s over alleged racism. Bloom, a witness of such an uprising at Cornell in 1969, insists that the radical black “sophists” (333) demanded unequal advantages that would (and ultimately did) degrade the academic system. Sadly, like Heidegger insisting that Hitler was paving the way to the new morality, weak-willed professors at Cornell capitulated to the death-threats of radicals in the name of “morality.” These professors had spoken eloquently in praise of academic freedom when academic freedom was easy, but they succumbed to tyranny when tyranny was fashionable.
Moreover, Bloom writes, three factors have led to the “decomposition of the university” (347). First, the major disciplines have become isolated from one another, fragmenting knowledge and leaving no sense of the unity that the old philosophers imagined. Second, the university community as a whole does not see any truth or validity in the Great Books so that, if they are read in humanities classes at all, the message is clear: “There is not truth—at least here” (372).
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Third, Bloom argues that the university does not give any particular direction in course requirements to students. Part of this is from the rise of professional degrees like the MBA, which steer students away from a liberal education and toward only those classes which will help them succeed in their jobs. The other part of this is from the general belief that there simply is not much worth knowing. In this is a “radical truth, a well-kept secret: the colleges do not have enough to teach their students, not enough to justify keeping them four years, probably not even three years....The so-called knowledge explosion and increasing specialization have not filled up the college years but emptied them” (340).
Second, Bloom argues throughout the book that democracy is a means, and not an end. Democracy allows members of society to seek what is true, noble, and beautiful, but it also allows for the possibility that people will seek something else. Thus, democracy creates its own power structure, weighted toward public opinion, regardless of how wise or foolish public opinion might be. It is for this reason that Bloom argues so strenuously about educating students—public opinion
without guidance from the wisdom of the ages will not be capable of imagining any alternatives other than the false dilemmas posed by whichever sophists currently hold power.
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