COMMENT
13
has been a tendency not to face or even to report the gravity of the
situation. For the most part, it has been covered up by educational
pieties and by attempts to rationalize these deficiencies . Basically,
Bloom's position is that the colleges do not help develop minds open
to the knowledge of the past and to the issues of contemporary life.
Behind this failure, according to Bloom, is the trendiness, the nar–
cissism, the cultural relativism, the egalitarianism, the antipathy to
reason , and the nihilism of society itself. The individualism nurtured
earlier in our history , he says , has been carried to such an extreme
that the sense of community and nation has almost disappeared.
Hence the curriculum has become haphazard , teaching has been
captured by current fads, and students do not acquire either the
knowledge we are heir to or the ability to sort out the different
theories and movements pressing in on them.
In
short, except for ex–
ceptional students, college education has become the interlude be–
tween secondary school and the job world .
Even if he might be wrong and superficial in many of his big
generalizations and small observations , and even if he might be
pushing his case too far, Bloom has to be commended for bringing
the dismal side of education to our attention. But he is not con–
vincing when he attributes our cultural relativism and nihilism
mainly to the influence of a few philosophers, and he is even less
convincing when he talks about educational ideals and how they
should be pursued . To be sure, the major figures Bloom cites–
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, among others-did ques–
tion the central place of reason in human conduct and gave more
prominence to the idea of the irrational. But they are not alone or
even primarily responsible for the contemporary anarchy of beliefs
and values . The pushing of the concept of democracy to wild ex–
tremes - Bloom does refer to Tocqueville's prophetic writing in this
area-probably has had more to do with our present free-for-all
mentality than any philosophical influences . And the effect of a free
market ideology on the current emphasis on sexual and psycho–
logical freedom needs to be investigated more than Bloom has done.
In
general, it should be obvious that all the forces of Western 'soci–
ety-political, philosophical , technological-have created the mind
of modernity . And they are not all to be denigrated. On the con–
trary , some of our ills - social and educational- may be seen as
necessary accompaniments to our enormous advances. Future his–
torians might well think of our educational defects as the underside
of the expansion of democracy.
