Word: blooms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Higher education officials say the debate over education traditionally helped Democrats because it centered around expanding educational opportunity for all students and on levels of federal financial assistance necessary to do so. However, rising college costs and recent sweeping attacks from such critics as Allan Bloom on the quality and content of college teaching have refocused the debate more along lines that Republicans prefer, on issues such as quality and "accountability...
THUS we return to Bloom. Bloom's critique of contemporary American higher education stems from his belief in the idea of the university embodied in the literal meaning of the word: one truth. It should be a place where a few stout-hearted Socratic souls doggedly pursue Truth, without having to look over their shoulders worrying about what "the many" think of their efforts. Pre-professionals need not apply. The dissolution of modern American higher education into multiversities catering to the needs and demands of mass democracy is the great crime of something known as "the sixties...
...Bloom obviously is on target with much of his criticism. At the very least, he certainly has struck a resonant chord among "the many" who have purchased his book. Yet his tenuous relationship with democracy is perhaps best captured in his failure to understand the importance of the democratizing role played by universities, especially the Ivies, in postwar American society...
...Bloom is rightly impatient with those who are ever-ready to rail against elitism in the university. Universities are eliti institutions, at least insofar as they operate on the meritocratic principle. What needs to be guarded against in the great universities is a more insidiousism, aristocratism. Like it or not, universities are at some level credential factories. They serve as a springboard for middle and lower-class individuals not only to live with and befriend those of the privileged classes--which is at least as important for the sake of the latter--but also to join them, eventually, in running...
...university can be a democratizing minor leagues for American society, it is serving a great and noble social purpose. Allan Bloom ignores this idea of the university because it only makes sense in the realm of worldly power and relationships that he abjures. Like his hero Socrates, the city that could claim his allegiance exists only in speeches, not anywhere on earth...