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A review by holtfan
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
5.0
At times it feels like listening to your Republican grandpa at dinner. He begins by bewailing the modern tastes of young people (rock music and walkmans!) and how no one cares about getting a real education these days. The word curmudgeon comes to mind.
Unless you keep reading. Suddenly he begins to lay the groundwork for his complaints. It is rambling, to be sure, but profound and thought-provoking. It begins to shift the way you think. Then he is off on another tangent...Plato...Great Books...and once again forcing you to think about the purpose of education and how we educate.
Although I think many conservatives did--and do--consider this a politically useful work, it mostly focuses on philosophy and making the argument for how it went wrong in the universities. It talks about intellectual inheritances and how Americans, well, Americanized German thought.
If you are like me, the very names of Nietzsche or Hegel sound intimidating and incomprehensible. But Professor Bloom is clearly comfortable with both, as well as a great many other philosophers, and he expounds on them with enthusiasm. Although he often lost me in the middle of his point, by the end I always understood what he meant.
In this way, I guess, you could say Professor Bloom is very much the lecturer. Sometimes dry and incomprehensible, he yet pursues his subject with zeal and passion and forces you to really think about what he is saying. And what he says is not always comfortable. But it is worth pondering.
The crisp style and philosophical bend reminded me of [a:Thomas Sowell|2056|Thomas Sowell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1230424337p2/2056.jpg], but instead of getting at ideas in politics, Professor Bloom gets at ideas in philosophy and education. He particularly focuses on the danger of relativism. He also comments on many of the ways American students differ from their European counterparts which I found particularly fascinating in our modern discussion of citizenship and integration.
I suspect this one will take a couple re-reads for me to fully understand.
Unless you keep reading. Suddenly he begins to lay the groundwork for his complaints. It is rambling, to be sure, but profound and thought-provoking. It begins to shift the way you think. Then he is off on another tangent...Plato...Great Books...and once again forcing you to think about the purpose of education and how we educate.
Although I think many conservatives did--and do--consider this a politically useful work, it mostly focuses on philosophy and making the argument for how it went wrong in the universities. It talks about intellectual inheritances and how Americans, well, Americanized German thought.
If you are like me, the very names of Nietzsche or Hegel sound intimidating and incomprehensible. But Professor Bloom is clearly comfortable with both, as well as a great many other philosophers, and he expounds on them with enthusiasm. Although he often lost me in the middle of his point, by the end I always understood what he meant.
In this way, I guess, you could say Professor Bloom is very much the lecturer. Sometimes dry and incomprehensible, he yet pursues his subject with zeal and passion and forces you to really think about what he is saying. And what he says is not always comfortable. But it is worth pondering.
The crisp style and philosophical bend reminded me of [a:Thomas Sowell|2056|Thomas Sowell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1230424337p2/2056.jpg], but instead of getting at ideas in politics, Professor Bloom gets at ideas in philosophy and education. He particularly focuses on the danger of relativism. He also comments on many of the ways American students differ from their European counterparts which I found particularly fascinating in our modern discussion of citizenship and integration.
I suspect this one will take a couple re-reads for me to fully understand.