Allan Bloom

“I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts.” Ps. 119:99-100

Before writing about the Declaration of Independence last week, I pulled down a few old works to refresh myself, among them being my well underlined copy of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom*. It should be required reading for every college or pre-college student or for those who hope to be parents of college students someday. Before investing $80,000 or more and four years of blood, sweat, and tears into a college degree, this book will help parent and student alike distinguish between chaff and solid food. Navigating the educational channels in a way that is actually profitable has never been more challenging than it is today. Bloom described the educational system in 1987 as “a technical smorgasbord” that is characterized by a “…utter inability to distinguish between important and unimportant in any way other than by the demands of the market.” Little has changed.

While he is best remembered for his scathing indictment of the impoverished world of academia, he does not spare the family for its failure to instill “a basic element of fundamental primary learning: religion.” It is not the unhappy broken homes he takes to task. It is the failure of relatively happy ones where parents are devoted to their family but have “…nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world, of high models of action or profound sense of connection with others.” By religion, he speaks openly of the influence of the Bible which transmitted “the wonder of the moral law” and made it possible to “raise” children, not merely “educate” them. He laments how people “sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together.” In this setting, “educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.”

It is the Bible that used to furnish our culture with a uniting sense of common belief for rich and poor, young and old, simple and educated. It was “the very model of model for a vision of the order of the whole of things” and a key to all of Western culture, art, and literature. Without knowledge of that book, Bloom pictures a world where the very idea or hope of truly integrated knowledge and order is lost. Without the Scripture, parents lose “the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise – as priest, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”

He blames the invasive and overwhelming influence of media that comes to control the atmosphere of the home, wresting it away from parents who have even “lost the will” to control it. Instead, we desperately need lives based on “the Book” that will provide us with access to the real nature of things, great revelations, a sense of the epic, and the human condition. Without a firm and real moral education that imparts a “vision of the moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments of good and evil,” education otherwise “becomes the vain attempt to give children ‘values’.” Bloom characterizes the “values-clarification” classes springing up as little more than propaganda pushing values that will inevitably change as public opinion changes. As a college professor, he seems to weep over the ensuing result that “there is less soil in which university teaching can take root….” Far less, indeed.

It is interesting reading that gives a whole world of meaning to what most of you are presently doing. It will make you feel the earth move beneath your feet the next time you do family devotions.

*Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1987