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Loading... Closing of the American Mind (original 1987; edition 1988)by Allan Bloom
Work InformationThe Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thoughts-thinking/201904/open-mindedness... Utter rubbish. Did any of the predictions come true? His conclusions are already outdated. An old fart pining for the "good ol' days." A 19th century education is no longer relevant. The good old days were merely old not necessarily any better, and by definition half the people in the world are always going to be below average. If Bloom had his way only the elite would ever be allowed to rule, something we see all too frequently is a disaster. I have waited years and years to read this. I knew there was good stuff in here, but now that I finally made time for it, I wasn't as excited to read about it now. Still, it was a provocative, intriguing, and historical read. **** Published in the late 80s, Allan Bloom wrote a scathing and disappointing report about the decline of reason and rise of relativism in the American university system. He blamed the 1960s for the change. You think? Bloom argued for a return to the Great Books in education, which help us to think about the ideas that matter: is there truth, freedom, and a God? -- something young people crave to know, but now never find out in higher learning because everything is relative. **** A few final (truncated) quotes: "A good program of liberal education feeds the student's love of truth and passion to live a good life." "The only serious solution is the one that is universally rejected: the good old Great Books approach, in which liberal education means reading classic texts, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them,...trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read."
ALLAN BLOOM, a professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Chicago, is perhaps best known as a translator and interpreter of Jean Jacques Rousseau's ''Emile'' and Plato's ''Republic,'' two classic texts that ponder the relationship between education and society. In ''The Closing of the American Mind,'' Mr. Bloom has drawn both on his deep acquaintance with philosophical thinking about education and on a long career as a teacher to give us an extraordinary meditation on the fate of liberal education in this country - a meditation, as he puts it in his opening pages, ''on the state of our souls.'' Is replied to inDistinctionsNotable Lists
In this book, the author (a distinguished political philosopher) argues that the social/political crisis of 20th-century America is really an intellectual crisis marked by obvious declines in appreciation of humanities, a drop in the qualitative output of our university systems, and a disquieting disconnect between today's students and the spiritual and cultural traditions of their heritage. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.92History and Geography North America United States 1901- Eisenhower Through Clinton AdministrationsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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