• Log In

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Subscribe on Android Spotify Google Podcasts audible patreon
  • Home
  • Podcast
    • PEL Network Episodes
    • Publicly Available PEL Episodes
    • Paywalled and Ad-Free Episodes
    • PEL Episodes by Topic
    • Nightcap
    • (sub)Text
    • Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Phi Fic Podcast
    • Combat & Classics
    • Constellary Tales
  • Blog
  • About
    • PEL FAQ
    • Meet PEL
    • About Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Meet Phi Fic
    • Listener Feedback
    • Links
  • Join
    • Become a Citizen
    • Join Our Mailing List
    • Log In
  • Donate
  • Store
    • Episodes
    • Swag
    • Everything Else
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

Ep. 192: “The Closing of the American Mind”: Allan Bloom on Education (Part One)

June 11, 2018 by Mark Linsenmayer 4 Comments

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_192pt1_5-6-18.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:27 — 49.0MB)

Allan Bloom New York Review of BooksOn Allan Bloom's 1987 best-seller about why students' disconnection from Great Books has led to relativism and ultimately nihilism.

What is the role of the university in our democracy? Bloom relates from his many years teaching the problem with kids today: They're subject to the evils that Tocqueville warned us go with American-style democracy: They're conformist, superficial, focused on the practical at the expense of the soul, and worst of all, the democratic ethos taken intellectually means that they're indiscriminate: Everyone's ideas are equally good. Bloom thinks that a liberal education should be the cure for this: by connecting with brilliant minds of the past, witnessing them speaking across history to each other, we become part of the great conversation about truth and virtue. People need to at one point in their lives seriously consider the question, "What is man?" in relation to our highest aspirations as opposed to our common, base needs. We need to forget, at least temporarily, about training for a particular job or any other practical consideration, and just engage in thinking for thinking's sake, which is the thing that Aristotle said makes us most human.

Bloom bemoans that incoming students for the most part no longer have favorite books, that their music is all instant gratification, and that they see truth as relative. While it is democracy itself that tends to support making people like this, ironically, this condition means that we're no longer fit to intelligently participate in politics. Bloom thinks that we need to understand intellectual history to understand the foundations of liberty and so be able to defend it. In overthrowing elites like the church and the noble class, we should become independent thinkers, but what happens much more often is that we just go along with the crowd, and the crowd's ethos in our case involves an ignorant scientism that disregards the needs of the soul, a leveling of values that precludes any serious discussion of the good, and the related idea that every opinion is equally valid.

Bloom includes Rawls and Mill in this condemnation. As you may recall, both of these thinkers were insistent that government shouldn't dictate the good to citizens (in Mill's case, this was a matter of not restricting speech), but Bloom is less concerned with the logical consequents of their philosophies than with the actual, social consequences, which in both cases Bloom diagnoses as nihilism: By denying values a central place in public norms, we promote mere legalism, pragmatism, i.e., a lack of values.

The full foursome is on board to reflect on how we feel about these critiques. Have our society and our educational system really produced a bunch of Nietzschean "last men"? Does Bloom's suggested program of Great Books (which is pretty much what Wes underwent at St. John's) actually produce better citizens?

Buy The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students or try this online version.

The image is by David Levine, drawn for the New York Review of Books' review of Bloom's book by Martha Nussbaum, which is pretty scathing and well worth your time. She focuses on the elitism involved in Bloom's account: He's really only worried about the quality of education of his elite students, and recommends a regimen that will surely be out of reach of most people who actually have to worry about making a living.

Continued on part 2, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition; your Citizenship will also get you the follow-up discussion. Please support PEL!

Sponsor: Visit thegreatcoursesplus.com/PEL for a one-month free trial of The Great Courses Plus Video Learning Service.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Filed Under: Podcast Episodes Tagged With: Allan Bloom, Great Books programs, philosophy of education, philosophy podcast, social critique

Comments

  1. Carl says

    June 14, 2018 at 8:58 am

    I agree with Bloom on the importance of the liberal arts education. But I can’t help but feel that in complaining about his students, he is missing the development that is going on. The students who came to university with favourite books and composers were, I suspect, upper or upper-middle class children, whose parents themselves had gone to university and could introduce them to these works, and who also had leisure time enough to engage with these things. The growth in the accessibility of the university in the 20th century means you get more students who (typically) did not grow up in homes with classical books and classical music, or who simply could not afford to spend much free time reading. If you are a supporter of the liberal arts education, this has to be a cause for celebration, because it means the type of profound self-reflection Bloom advocates is not just limited to a small elite.

    Maybe Bloom deals with this more in his book. I cannot help but feel, however, that it ties back to his valorization of Socrates and the Republic as an educational model. The dialectical education Socrates gives to young men like Lysis is, of course, unparalleled in terms of broadening the mind. But you can’t personally debate all of Athens. This kind of education is only possible because it is so narrow, because it excludes women, slaves, poor people: everybody who is not a handsome young aristocratic boy. I think Bloom forgets this, and so overlooks the fact that the decline in the enthusiasm of the students is not a decline, but a consequence of the democratization of the university.

    Reply
  2. Simon says

    June 16, 2018 at 10:43 pm

    ‘See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power.
    That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I mean, there’s a big literature about the Sixties, and it’s mostly written by intellectuals, because they’re the people who write books, so naturally it has a very bad name-because they hated it. You could see it in the faculty clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the idea that students were suddenly asking questions and not just copying things down. In fact, when people like Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind] write as if the foundations of civilization were collapsing in the Sixties, from their point of view that’s exactly right: they were. Because the foundations of civilization are, “I’m a big professor, and I tell you what to say, and what to think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you repeat it.” If you get up and say, “I don’t understand why I should read Plato, I think it’s nonsense,” that’s destroying the foundations of civilization. But maybe it’s a perfectly sensible question – plenty of philosophers have said it, so why isn’t it a sensible question?
    As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Sixties-but that’s the only thing that makes it into history: the crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on are out of history-and that’s because they had a kind of libertarian character, and there is nothing more frightening to people with power.’ – Noam Chomsky

    Reply
  3. Luke T says

    June 17, 2018 at 7:17 am

    Utility and Luxury

    I’m sympathetic with sentiments expressed in this episode, by Wes and Seth, about the socializing and civilizing effects of a core tertiary curriculum (Great Books or otherwise), but hold similar suspicions as others that it is just a tad too elitist for the American mode. What’s more, it betrays the considerable amount of investment (privilege, if you prefer) required to bring one to an adequate, prerequisite level before stepping into such a venerable program.

    It’s a luxury good, in other words, and perhaps the biggest luxury one can buy in college education, for the practical cash-out value being (1) empirically hard to measure, and (2) arguably modest when compared to our highly-refined taxonomy of American university-degree specialization.

    That very deliberate specialization (e.g. business degrees, law degrees, medical degrees, and so on) is a critical component of the dynamism of our remarkable economy, and the envy of the world round. It’s based on the same classic-liberal utility theory that the PEL crew have taken on in other episodes (e.g. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek) and her secret sauce is ‘the multiplier effect.’ That multiplier effect, in turn, is what accounts for our nation’s amazing wealth and surplus of leisure (residual economic-inequality notwithstanding). And that surplus of wealth and leisure, by our PEL hosts’ own explicit admission, are constituent parts to leading a self-reflective, examined life.

    So this leads me to the conclusion that we have cooked something here like aporia? That is, contained within the normative aspiration for a tradition-cohesive, educated populace is this contradiction: In order to build your better Republic, one must abjure the canonical curriculum and let her citizens find as much on their own terms.

    Reply
  4. Uri strauss says

    June 18, 2018 at 4:55 am

    I’m disappointed that there was no mention of Robert Paul Wolff’s classic review of Bloom’s book as a piece of Saul Bellow fiction, in the journal Academe.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Citizenship has its Benefits

Become a PEL Citizen
Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free, including exclusive Part 2's for episodes starting September 2020; our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally; a community of fellow learners, and more.

Rate and Review

Nightcap

Listen to Nightcap
On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to listener email and chat more casually about their lives, the making of the show, current events and politics, and anything else that happens to come up.

Subscribe to Email Updates

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Support PEL

Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

Recent Comments

  • Frank Levi on Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part One)
  • Evan on Episode 130: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life?
  • Jelle on Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part One)
  • Erick Mitsak on Episode 130: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life?
  • Evan Hadkins on Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part Two for Supporters)

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

Become a PEL Citizen!

As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music, and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join.

Blog Post Categories

  • (sub)Text
  • Aftershow
  • Announcements
  • Audiobook
  • Book Excerpts
  • Citizen Content
  • Citizen Document
  • Citizen News
  • Close Reading
  • Combat and Classics
  • Constellary Tales
  • Exclude from Newsletter
  • Featured Article
  • General Announcements
  • Interview
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Misc. Philosophical Musings
  • Nakedly Examined Music Podcast
  • Nakedly Self-Examined Music
  • NEM Bonus
  • Not School Recording
  • Not School Report
  • Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
  • PEL Music
  • PEL Nightcap
  • PEL's Notes
  • Personal Philosophies
  • Phi Fic Podcast
  • Philosophy vs. Improv
  • Podcast Episode (Citizen)
  • Podcast Episodes
  • Pretty Much Pop
  • Reviewage
  • Song Self-Exam
  • Things to Watch
  • Vintage Episode (Citizen)
  • Web Detritus

Follow:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2022 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy

Copyright © 2022 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in