The closing of the American mind : how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students

Bibliothèque	Type de document	Numéro de cote topographique	Nombre d'enregistrements enfants	Emplacement	Statut	Réservations du document
Recherche en cours... Government Records	Book	E 169.1 .B653 1987	1	Stacks	Recherche en cours... Inconnu	Recherche en cours... Indisponible
Recherche en cours... Science	Book	PROF E169.1 .B653 1987	1	Resource Center	Recherche en cours... Inconnu	Recherche en cours... Indisponible

The Closing of the American Mind, a publishing phenomenon in hardcover, is now a paperback literary event. In this acclaimed number one national best-seller, one of our country's most distinguished political philosophers argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis. Allan Bloom's sweeping analysis is essential to understanding America today. It has fired the imagination of a public ripe for change. Book jacket.

Critiques (5)

Critique du Publishers Weekly

Plato said that music was a barbaric art form, and Bloom, translator of Plato's Republic, charges that rock 'n' roll's sole attraction is a ``barbaric appeal to sexual desire.'' This University of Chicago professor claims that racial segregation among today's students is largely due to the fact that ``blacks have become blacks'' and stick together. He brands Margaret Mead as a ``sexual adventurer'' whose call for cultural diversity betrayed her indifference to American ideals embodied in th Declaration of Independence. Marred by the author's biases, this jeremiad laments the decay of the humanities, the decline of the family and students' spiritual rootlessness and unconnectedness to traditions. Bloom traces what he sees as as an antiEnlightenment attitude in our society that dates back to Rousseau. He calls for a ``Great Books'' educational program that would teach students the unity of the sciences, social sciences and arts. (April) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Critique de Kirkus

In this brilliant, yet sometimes venomous and petty book, Bloom has described what he calls the total impoverishment of American liberal education, its failure to pose questions about the meaning of the good life, to expose students to principles and ideals of lasting value, and to convey to them a sense of relationship to a larger community and set of traditions beyond themselves. This failure, according to Bloom (philosophy/Chicago), has been shaped by an American culture that has embraced self-development over community obligation, destroyed the differences between the sexes, fostered a dangerous ""value relativism,"" and encouraged hostility to the past and to all binding relationships. Today, young Americans are isolated, separate, self-centered, tolerant of everything and committed to nothing, he says. Universities reflect these conditions: careerism is rampant; the natural sciences, which have ""nothing to say about human beings,"" reign supreme; the curriculum is splintered into an array of unrelated disciplines, and affirmative action, one of the legacies of the 60's, has undermined standards of excellence. Contempt for the humanities is widespread, and there is a general indifference to the need to integrate knowledge. The solution to this educational crisis, says Bloom, lies in the reconstitution of the university, in its renewed commitment to teaching the central principles of Western civilization, in the revitalization of philosophy, and in a return to the study of the Great Books. Although much of what Bloom says is not new, his book contains many telling insights. And much venom. He caricatures feminism, insists that affirmative action has caused racism, and denounces rock music as a ""gutter"" phenomenon. His book is further marred by his near-obsession with Cornell University, where he taught in the 1960's, and where, according to him, 60's radicals--and ""black thugs,"" in particular--virtually eviscerated liberal education. Such attacks make his book seem more like an act of revenge than a rational invitation to educational reform. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Critique de Booklist

Allan Bloom, philosopher of education and social critic at the University of Chicago, has produced a minor masterpiece, a commentary on how the educated population of this country thinks. Bloom maintains that we are in a crisis in the West because we have abandoned our intellectual tradition, that wellspring of Western thought beginning with Socrates and Plato and extending through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. At war with the prevailing climate of opinion, dominated as it is by cultural relativism of the 1960s, Bloom prefers the inherited ways of the West and even has a kind word for Santa Claus! His view of our current malaise is bleak indeed. Lacking knowledge of any of their traditions, students arrive at the university ``nice'' but ignorant and totally unprepared for the experience of liberal education an experience that most universities are no longer willing or able to offer anyway. Although his point of view is certainly controversial, Bloom's book represents a remarkable achievement: many writers are satisfied if they can fit two or three original thoughts into one book, but this volume brims with ideas, all of which demand our attention. To be indexed. RR. 973.92 U.S. Intellectual life 20th century / Education, Higher U.S. Philosophy [OCLC] 86-24768

Critique de Choice

A brilliant and at times frustrating critique of the soul of higher learning in the US. The crisis Bloom perceives is an intellectual crisis. He attempts to show how American democracy has wounded itself by playing host to vulgarized versions of 19th-century Continental thought. He sees in the current decline in intellectual life at the American university a parallel to a similar retreat that occurred at the German universities during the 1930s where, under the influence of pseudo-Nietzschean and pseudo-Rousseauian teachings, the structure of rational inquiry was dismantled. Nihilism, despair, and relativism led to the collapse of the curriculum, and the young were left without an understanding of the past or a vision of the future-doomed to live only in the impoverished present. This work is strongest in its intellectual history, in tracing the transmutation of ideas during the last 150 years. It is weakest, ironically, when describing today's college students and the state of higher education. Here it is mean-spirited, seeing the young to be nothing more than spiritual victims of rock music, casual sex, the women's movement, and therapy. Bloom's perspective is too exclusively from lofty academic chairs at a series of elite institutions. Although with a host of caveats, this work is essential and provocative reading. Levels: graduate and upper-division undergraduate.-L.S. Zwerling, New York University

Critique du Library Journal

Bloom is angry about college studentstolerant of everything, they cannot appreciate the virtues of Lockean democracy and often abandon the great questions about God and man. Meanwhile, the humanities are like ``a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries . . . are idling.'' The reason is partly relativism in the social sciences but largely German philosophers since Nietzsche, especially Heidegger, who ``put philosophy at the service of German culture.'' Bloom's case about the humanities and German philosophy deserves an ear, but his students from ``the twenty or thirty best U.S. universities'' are nothing like my recent American students, who pursue the old questions with vim and vigor. Perhaps they do not belong to Bloom's elite. Leslie Armour, Philosophy Dept., Univ. of Ottawa, Canada (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Table des matières

Saul Bellow

Foreword	p. 11
Preface	p. 19
Introduction: Our Virtue	p. 25
Part 1 Students
The Clean Slate	p. 47
Books	p. 62
Music	p. 68
Relationships	p. 82
Self-Centeredness	p. 82
Equality	p. 88
Race	p. 91
Sex	p. 97
Separateness	p. 109
Divorce	p. 118
Love	p. 122
Eros	p. 132
Part 2 Nihilism, American Style
The German Connection	p. 141
Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature	p. 157
The Self	p. 173
Creativity	p. 180
Culture	p. 185
Values	p. 194
The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa	p. 217
Our Ignorance	p. 227
Part 3 The University
From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede	p. 243
Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life	p. 246
The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society	p. 256
The Philosophic Experience	p. 268
The Enlightenment Transformation	p. 284
Swift's Doubts	p. 293
Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University	p. 298
The Sixties	p. 313
The Student and the University	p. 336
Liberal Education	p. 336
The Decomposition of the University	p. 347
The Disciplines	p. 356
Conclusion	p. 380
Index	p. 383

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