“The Closing of the (North) American Mind” by Robert Nielsen
In this provocative essay, Robert Nielsen reviews a book by American philosopher Allan Bloom. This book critiques the American education system, which Nielsen considers to be in the same state of disarray as the Canadian one. What do you think?
Instead of encouraging us to think and live well, "higher education," according to this scathing bestseller, is offering shifting values and irresponsible freedom.
Now that higher education is within easier reach of Canadians than ever before, it's time to ask: What's so high about it? That's the question we are urged to consider by Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, which has surprised its author and publisher by becoming an international best-seller. In Canada as well as the United States, it has provoked keen debate over what the aims of education should be.
If we are content merely to have our universities train doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and other professionals, they are probably serving us adequately. But if we share Bloom's fervent belief that universities should also offer students pathways to "the good life" of wisdom and virtue, then they are letting us down badly.
Subtitled "How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students," the book scathingly indicts the universities for abandoning moral truth in favour of a shallow, shifting mix of "values." This moral relativism tens to justify whatever current opinions and behaviour students feel comfortable with; and they may pass through four years without ever encountering a professor – or book – that challenges them to do some serious thinking about their ideas
Bloom, a classical scholar and philosopher, has taught at several North American universities, including the University of Toronto, and his criticisms are applicable to the Canadian as well as to the American scene. Bloom finds today's students "nice" in that they are tolerant and willing to concede everybody the rights they claim for themselves. They are not, he said, especially moral or noble. They don't fall in love, they have sexual "relationships" that are easy to start and easy to abandon. They have little idealism. "There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing - caring,' 'self-fulfillment,' 'expanding consciousness,' and so on."
Students have no understanding of evil and even doubt its existence, thus lacking awareness of the depths as well as the heights of human nature. They read few books, and find neither pleasure nor insights for living in the great literature of the past; in history, no lessons for the present.
Futile Propaganda. The universities, of course, don't shape these "flatsouled" young people. They arrive on campus as products of homes, schools, and a commercially packaged youth culture far more influential
than either parents or teachers in forming their tastes and attitudes. Here Bloom widens his target to our modern society itself.
Even in relatively happy homes, he says, "the dreariness of the family's spiritual landscape passes belief." Parents have quit their traditional role of instilling beliefs in religion, morals, and patriotism. Once "the Bible was the common culture, one that united the simple and the sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old." Now neither it nor other great books passed down to us are read and discussed in the home because "nobody believes that the old books do, or could, contain the truth." Claims Bloom: "Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise-as priests, prophets, and philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all they can imagine."
In default of moral education at home, the schools give courses in "value clarification." These prompt children to talk about abortion, sexism, and the arms race, "issues the significance of which they cannot possibly understand." Such education is little more than propaganda, Bloom contends, and futile propaganda at that. The values at which the children arrive will change as public opinion changes-because they are not grounded in experience or passion, the bases of moral reasoning.
Meanwhile reading and writing are widely ill-taught in public schools, and television replaces reading in the home. This compels universities to set up remedial classes for the many high-school graduates who cannot read or write well enough to cope with first-year courses.
Delusive Openness. How do the universities respond to the masses of uncivilized young people? In general, Bloom maintains, by accommodating in every field except science and professional training the students' ignorance and paltry aims.
Literate or not, earnest or trifling, rich or poor, nearly every student, says Bloom, enters university with one fixed belief-that truth is relative. Students assume that ideas are valid only for their own time and place, or perhaps only for the individual holding them; that there are no universal and eternal verities for people to learn and live by. This leaves everyone free to think and do as they please, without worrying about right and wrong, so long as they don't infringe on others' freedom to do likewise. The only sin is intolerance.
Such "openness," Bloom says, actually leads to closed minds because it makes students incurious about real distinctions between good and bad, between right and wrong, between truth and error, instead of leading them to seek knowledge and certitude. In Bloom's view, "to deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness."
Bloom says education should make students curious about man's highest aspirations, as opposed to his low and common needs. And they have to become aware that the answer is not obvious, but neither is it unavailable. It can't be found, however, without consulting the great thinkers and writers of the past.
The quest should be led by the humanities-literature, philosophy, and history But the humanities faculties are in poor shape to carry out the task after caving in to the demands of a student "rabble" in the 1960s, Bloom alleges. Relaxed academic standards and easy grading made it hard for a student to flunk out. Junk courses were devised to cater to the demands for political "relevance."
The universities are quieter now, but Bloom warns against assuming that they have recovered their quality and integrity Students can choose humanities courses in cafeteria style, picking out a list of soft ones that will get them an arts degree without giving them coherent knowledge.
At the same time, the faculties go their separate ways. At the University of Toronto, science students need take only three of their twenty courses in either arts or social science, and non-science students need take no science at all. The different faculties compete for students, but don't even try to collaborate in offering anyone a rounded education.
"These great universities," Bloom writes, "which can split the atom, find cures for the most terrible diseases, and produce massive dictionaries of lost languages, cannot generate a modest program of general education for undergraduate students." A good program of liberal education, he says, "feeds the student's love of truth and passion to live a good life." He adds that it is easy to devise courses of study that thrill those who take them; the difficulty is getting them accepted by the faculty
Students come to US universities ignorant and cynical about their country's history, Bloom says. Their cynicism, at least, stands to be increased by "revisionist" historians who promote either or both of two poisonous distortions of history They malign the character and ideas of the American founding fathers, and they pervert recent history to make the United States rather than the Soviet Union the villain in the contest between communism and democracy. (Some of these revisionists have moved north to places on Canadian university faculties, where they fuel anti-Americanism.) Thus young Americans are taught to be apologetic instead of proud of a political heritage that made their country the leading democracy and themselves perhaps the most privileged youth ever.
A milder form of this erosion is happening in Canada, where the British heritage used to be central to the teaching of literature and history. "Now," says Thomas Pangle, a former student of Bloom's who is today a professor of political philosophy at the University of Toronto, "a Canadian student is not expected to know any more about English literature than a student in Missouri. If a university teacher quotes Dickens or Shakespeare, he can't count on the students sensing any echoes." Canadian universities have generally gone along with the trend, although at the University of Toronto the eminent scholar Northrop Frye held the fort by insisting on the study of the Bible and Shakespeare.
"Ignorant Shepherds." Bloom's is a profound book, full of rewards to the attentive reader because of the richness of his thought and the clarity, energy, and wit of his writing. Near the end he offers a poignant metaphor of where we now stand in relation to the great tradition of human learning:
"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part. All that is necessary is a careful excavation to provide them with life-enhancing models."
The restoration, if it comes, will be no easy task. The causes of the ills Bloom exposes in our education and our society are too deep for quick fixes-although a return to competent teaching of the three R's in school would be a useful beginning.
It is no surprise that the book has come under sharp attack. It defies almost every tenet of fashionable modern thought, and leaves no academic ox ungored. What is surprising, and heartening, is the phenomenal response to it. A year after its publication it was still on The New York Times best-seller list. This can only mean that many people sense a hollowness at the core of modern life which cannot be filled by more science and technology, more wealth and comforts, more sex and amusements.
A critic who credited the book's success to smart promotion was corrected by New York author Midge Deeter, a close observer of today's youth. "The reason the book sold well," she says, "is that a lot of people, young people in particular, found themselves and their own feelings of emptiness reflected in it. The people who started the great publicity snowball were young people who read this and said, 'My God, that's us.'"
There are indeed young people who want more from university than a few years of irresponsible freedom. They feel cheated. Bloom's book offers a wealth of clues to what they are missing, and to what must be done to make higher education worthy of the name. From it young readers will emerge, it is hoped, champions of healthy change-change that restores the ancient goal of thinking and living well.
