The Book Wars : What It Takes to Be Educated in America

The author is a literary journalist--an editor of NY Times Magazine, Atlantic, and Vanity Fair. He limns the substantive arguments put up by academics for and against The Great Books taught, or not, as the core of higher education.

The outline of the war more or less begins with the introduction of Allan Bloom, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, and his publication of "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987. Arthur Schlesinger Jr predicted this book would be another half-read best-seller that strikes a momentary nerve, is rarely read through, and "is soon forgotten". [We now see that his prediction, while true, has taken a ghastly turn, with a generation of "revisionist" ideologues only pretending to teach "Great" show more Books. ]

Atlas takes the trouble to sound out the sides in the war, and ventilates the positions, warts and all. However, it not a view with insight into the real challenge, which is not "teaching", but understanding. Bloom can quote from Socrates' "Apology" and explode Heidegger's "Rektoratsrede" but can he deliver their burdens to a single student? No, he fails utterly. And the barbarians at the gate were not the leftists or the deconstructionists he derides, pointlessly but repeatedly, but the fascists in love with the power of guns and tribal hatreds.

At the end, Atlas agrees with Bloom, and concludes: "Only a nation schooled in basic values--and we're no longer a nation schooled in anything at all--will grasp the negotiation between personal freedom and collective self-interest that is the essence of our American democracy. Those ideas are learned in books. The Great Books. The best that has been thought and said. The canon. Until a few years ago, this was our educational mandate. If it goes, a tradition that we cherished will go with it." show less