It has been 28 years since Professor Allan Bloom produced a remarkably readable and poignant critique of American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind. In it he explained what had once been the goal of diffusing and infusing all that knowledge available from a “liberal” university education:
…[T]he teacher dedicated to liberal education must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness…. What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind…. Fascination with one’s students leads to an awareness of the various kinds of soul and their various capacities for truth and error as well as learning. Such experience is a condition of investigating the question, ‘What is man?,’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs. A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which the question is not a continuous concern…. Liberal education flourished when it prepared the way for the discussion of a unified view of nature and man’s place in it, which the best minds debated on the highest level. …
… Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being…. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime…. … The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right to found a people,….[o]r, to put it otherwise, the regime established here promised untrammeled freedom to reason—not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated.
He then went on to note that this type of education so essential to the American achievement began to decay sometime between the end of World War II and the end of the 1960’s, when we, as a society, stopped trying to educate people to thrive in a democracy by learning about and using the highest human aspirations developed over many millennia of experiences, but instead, used our schools to try and instill a new, “democratic” personality in our children.
He describes this personality as an “Openness” in which,
… [t]he 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 mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all…. The purpose of their education is…to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.
The perverse effect of this “Openness” has been to create individuals and groups that recognize no common bond with their neighbors, with their country, with the past or with the future, and recognize no “self-evident” truths that we should aspire to know and live by. Instead, they see those of us educated in the older “liberal” tradition as being the dangerous “true believers”. Those now educated to be “open” hold no allegiance but to themselves—their own thoughts, and their own desires—and to an over-indulgence in the perceived permanence of the oppressions they see in the present moment.
As a consequence, the product of higher education that we have been producing by the hundreds of thousands—including many of our own children—at such a tremendous cost over the last generation are young men and women who are cloistered from their fellow countrymen by their unflinching belief in the correctness of their uninformed attitudes and beliefs at the core of their “open” personalities; who are mired in a preoccupation with the “low and common needs” of segregated groups, instead of being committed to strive for the highest universal aspirations of mankind; and who embrace recycled ideas and schemes that tend to only manage and balance the oppressions of the moment among competing interests, rather than join the longer, harder struggle to help their neighbors permanently rise above such oppressions.
I was reminded of Dr. Bloom’s observations a couple of days ago when I happened to read a perfect example of the type of empty “Openness” he described. I found it in the Notable & Quotable column of the April 6, 2015 edition of the Wall Street Editorial section. The WSJ quoted at length from a college senior’s recent letter to Brown University’s student newspaper in which the young man tried to explain the rationale behind the recent student-led efforts to prevent certain speakers from appearing on college campuses to present “uncomfortable” messages. Here is his explanation:
… [W]hen students claim a lecture or event is “uncomfortable,” it’s not because the chair cushion is sagging. Nor is it because we simply don’t like the ideas being touted before us. It is because the speakers promoting these ideas do not display an effort to be inclusive in their thoughts. . . .
When I say your argument makes me uncomfortable, it is because I am greatly concerned that you have not done the requisite thought and research into generating an inclusive thesis that considers as many nuances as necessary to deliver a sound debate.
If you do not believe that skin color, age, religious identity, sexuality, class or (dis)ability have an effect in cultural, political or economic problems that we debate at universities, then it is you who is trying to remain comfortable despite such frightening realities. In this sense, being uncomfortable is the strongest form of rhetoric that our millennial generation wields in the struggle against all forms of oppression.
After reading and re-reading this Ivy-League senior’s letter, I was astonished by the clarity with which he conveyed the full decay of our educational system since Bloom first published his book.
Let me share what will probably be a revelation to this young man and his other cohorts of “our millennial generation”: “skin color, age, religious identity, sexuality, class or (dis)ability,” and all sorts of imaginative forms of “oppression,” have always constituted the momentary conditions of man’s (and woman’s) existence and impacted his (and her) perceptions and experiences. But these momentary conditions were never the end of the story, just the beginning.
The rest of the story has been the perpetual struggle in every age by every generation to rise above these momentary conditions—to discover and try to live by the higher aspirations of mankind learned from asking that old question “What is man?” Maybe if our young Ivy Leaguer had dusted off a few of those old books written long ago by “dead white guys” and stored somewhere in the University’s library, he would have learned that the pursuit of those higher aspirations challenged mankind to accept and harness our free will to love our neighbors, regardless of their “skin color, age, religious identity, sexuality, class or (dis)ability.” Each civilization has written its own story of their own peculiar experiences with this struggle, but they all are part of this continuing story.
We all join our ancestors, and our posterity, as characters in this continuing story, with a sacred obligation to continue the struggle. The continuing story of the founding and subsequent history of the United States, in which this young man joins us as a character, is an exceptional chapter in the longer story of Western Civilization’s struggle to accept the self-evident truth of individual liberty in all its forms, and to use it to live with our neighbors by the Golden Rule.
The story has no end that any of us can ever know. It is a constant and continuing struggle in pursuit of a higher way of life—what those old dead Founders described as the “pursuit of happiness” even as they continued to struggle with the grievous sin that maintained the momentary conditions of slavery. They pursued it and then passed the struggle on to those imperfect souls who fought to the death to end slavery, who then passed the struggle on to those sinners who fought (and continue to fight) for civil rights. That’s the nature of a never-ending story based on the pursuit of higher aspirations.
Sadly, many of those “uncomfortable” messages our young Ivy Leaguer has tried so hard not to hear don’t reject the existence of the momentary conditions he seems so fixated on; instead, they offer keys to understand and join the never-ending story through which he and his cohorts can struggle with the rest of us to overcome the oppressions with which he is simply jousting. But, until they listen to those “uncomfortable” messages, they’ll never appreciate how much they are missing, or how empty and futile their “struggle” will be.
