Notes are mostly from Part I. I didn't have a liberal education, as such, most of the book was hard for me to understand. Maybe Bloom is right. The quotes and notes below are not reflective of my personal opinion, just interesting pieces and talking points I found in Part I of Bloom's book.
Bloom's Thesis: University and more so, modern culture is failing American students, no one is getting a full liberal education any more. 'Openness' to everything degrades ability to have an opinion and think critically about what is right and wrong, what is the best thing to do.
Big question: What is a liberal arts education? What does it mean to be educated like that? What is the fulfilling life Bloom claims we are missing?
Liberal arts education should provide students with strong moral virtue -- openness, according to quote below. But we need the right kind of openness (vide infra).
Overall, didn't really like how unneccesarily dense Bloom's writing was, and he contradicted himself in his writing a bit. He could have made his points simpler and easier to detect and not have written the piece with the drawn out, complicated prose. He didn't give much in terms of proof about what he was saying, mainly expected readers to take his word about what he observed as a professor. Nonetheless he had some good points and says some controversial things as well (some below). I think if this book came out in 2018 there would be outrage with a lot of the things he says. Maybe this hypothetical outrage in fact proves his points about the closing of the American mind. Reading with an open mind is important, and I felt like I understood some of his points and agreed him on some things. A famous book, but you have to really want to read it to get through it.
Page 26: "Openness -- and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings -- is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all." ... "The purpose of their [the students] education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue -- openness."
Page 27: "The old view [on education] was that, by recognizing and accepting man's natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. ... This did not necessarily mean abondoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean subordinating them to new principles. here was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself." ... "The recent education of openness has rejected all that. ... It does not demand fundamental agreement or the abondonment of old or new beliefs in favor of the natural ones. It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?"
Page 28: "It was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all."
Page 41: "Thus there are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference -- promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers -- and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination. This second kind of openness encourages the desire that animates and makes interesting every serious student -- 'I want to know what is good for me, what will make me happy' -- while the former stunts that desire."
The promotion of this 'openness of indifference' is what is closing the American mind.
Page 41: "Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled."
Page 42: "If openness means to 'go with the flow,' it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it. True openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present."
Page 43: "One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation." ... "Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are." ... "The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty. It can only have been constituted by a method that is unaware of how difficult it is to recognize that a prejudice is a prejudice." ... "Have we so simplified the soul that it is no longer difficult to explain?"
On education:
Page 63: "'You are not a professor of political philosophy but a travel agent.' Nothing could have better expressed my intention as an educator." ... "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion."
On music:
Page 81: "These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and as false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf."
Section in Relationships on Equality:
Interesting to hear his overly optimistic view about students and their views on equality.
Page 92: "These students have made the adjustment, without missing a beat, to a variety of religions and nationalities, the integration of Orientals and the change in women's aspirations and roles. It would require a great deal of proof to persuade me that they remain subtly racist."
Didn't a lot of racist stuff happen at Cornell while Bloom was teaching there? What about fraternities and the inherently exclusivist/elitist ideals they propogate? Seems to be making this point on how great everyone is while ignoring what is happening at his own school. Makes me question his other stuff. Seems to polarizing. He is either completely for it (thinks equality is solved, comments on feminism being solved too) or completely against it (music ruining young minds, getting rid of their ability to desire something deeper?)
Page 93: "Further, it is peculiar in that blacks seems to be the only group that has picked up 'ethnicity' -- the discovery or the creation of the sixties -- in an instinctive way. At the same time, there has been a progressive abandonment on their part of belief or interest in a distinctive black 'culture.' Blacks are not sharing a special positive intellectual or moral experience; they partake fully in the common culture, with the same goals and tastes as everyone else, but they are doing it by themselves. They continue to have the inward sentiments of separateness caused by exclusion when it no longer effectively exists. The heat is under the pot, but they do not melt as have all other groups."
Page 94: "Cornell, where I taught for several years, was one of many institutions that announced great increases in goals for enrollment of blacks. The president, adding a characteristic twist, also announced that not only would it seek blacks, but that it would find them not among privileged blacks but in the inner cities. [Probably didn't work, doesn't work for poor white people either] At the beginning of the 1967 academic year there were many more blacks on campus and, of course, in order to get so many, particularly poor blacks, standards of admission had silently and drastically been altered. Nothing had been done to prepare these students for the great intellectual and social challenges awaiting them in the university. Cornell now had a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared, and therefore it faced an inevitable choice: fail most of them or pass them without their having learned. Moralism and press relations made the former intolerable; the latter was only partially possible (it required consenting faculty and employers after college who expected and would accept incompetence) and was unbearable shameful to black students and university alike. It really meant that blacks would be recognizably second-class citizens."
Black power: (Page 94) "Who says that what universities teach is the truth rather than just the myths necessary to support the system of domination? Black students are second-class not because they are academically poor, but because they are being forced to imitate white culture." ... (Page 95) "But this was really a cop-out, and the license for a new segregationism that would allow the white impresarios to escape from the corner they had painted themselves into. The way was opened for black students to live and study the black experience, to be comfortable, rather than be constrained by the learning accessible to man as man." ... "The black studies programs largely failed because what was serious in them did not interest the students, and the rest was unprofitable hokum."
Page 96: "Affirmative action now institutionalizes the worse aspects of separatism. The fact is that the average black student's achievements do not equal those of the average white student in the good universities, and everybody knows it." ... "Their [black students'] successes become questionable in their own eyes." ... "This gives them a powerful incentive to avoid close associations with whites, who might be better qualified than they are and who might be looking down on them. Better to stick together, so these subtle but painful difficulties will not arise." ... "Affirmative action (quotas), at least in universities, is the source of what I fear is a long-term deterioration of the relations between the races in America."
Section in Relationships on Love:
Page 130: "In family questions, inasmuch as men were understood to be so strongly motivated by property, an older wisdom tried to attach concern for the family to that motive: the man was allowed and encouraged to regard his family as his property, so he would care for the former as he would instinctively care for the latter. This was effective, although it obviously had disadvantages from the point of view of justice. When wives and children come to the husband and father and say, 'We are not your property; we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such,' the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed. But the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they are giving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father's flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father will almost inevitablly constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be." ... "Plato taught that, however laudable justice may be, one cannot expect prodigies of virtue from ordinary people. Better a real city tainted by selfish motives than one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny." ... "I [Bloom] am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitues for them just because we want or need them."
From Part III:
Page 340: "The Cornell plan for dealing with the problem of liberal education was to suppress the students' longing for liberal education by encouraging their professionalism and their avarice, providing money and all the prestige the university had available to make careerism the centerpiece of the university. The Cornell plan dared not state the radical truth, a well-kept secret: the colleges do not have enough to teach their students, not enough to justify keeping them four years, probably not even three years. If the focus is careers, there is hardly one specialty, outside the hardest of the hard natural sciences, which requires more than two years of preparatory training prior to graduate studies. The rest is just wasted time, or a period of ripening until the students are old enough for graduate studies." ... "These great universities -- which can split the atom, find cures for the most terrible diseases, conduct surveys of whole populations and produce massive dictionaries of lost languages -- cannot generate a modest program of general education for undergraduate students. This is a parable for our times."
May we are sending kids to college too early, they could do something else for two years and then go? I think this is not realistic and impossible to implement given the inertia of our system. College is also about growing up too. The ripening Bloom mentions needs to occur somewhere, albeit college is a very expensive ripening ground. I do believe that not everyone should automatically go to college, and although a degree has typically been the minimum requirement for a 'good life', I think this will shift soon. People may start trending more toward trade jobs (electrician/plumber/even simple coder) when they find their colleges were not worth the money. For example, coding bootcamps are boasting the ability to get a software job without having to do four years of school. It's not that simple, but the trend is still slowly growing.
A moment at Cornell that will live on forever is the Williard Straight Hall takeover. It can be argued that this is one of the tipping points that set Cornell on the track to pre-professionalism focused education. A number of the best humanities professors left after seeing how Cornell handled the situation. Now essentially all Cornell humanities professors are very liberal, and there are not any remaining famous teachers in the faculty (no more Allan Blooms). The famous professors at Cornell now are teaching engineering. Perhaps Bloom saw this coming, and feels this too was reflective of the closing of the American mind.