The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy And Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students - Softcover

Allan David Bloom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140112170 ISBN 13: 9780140112177

Publisher: Penguin, 1988

Synopsis

This critique about the intellectual and moral confusions of our age promotes the view that young people, lacking an understanding of the past and a vision of the future, live in an impoverished present. The author claims that universities no longer provide the knowledge of the great tradition of philosophy and literature that made students aware of the order of nature and of man's place within it and that higher education fails to arouse or to nurture the self-knowledge that has always been the basis for serious, humane learning. The result is a diagnosis of cultural changes which occurred in the last decades in Western civilization, including changes in the language of politics and morals.

About this title

Review

S. Frederick Starr "The Washington Post Book World" Rich and absorbing....A grand tour of the American mind.

"The New York Times" Remarkable....hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy.

William Kristol "The Wall Street Journal" Brilliant....No other book combines such shrewd insights into our current state....No other book is at once so lively and so deep, so witty and so thoughtful, so outrageous and so sensible, so amusing and so chilling....An extraordinary book.

"The New York Times Book Review" An unparalleled reflection on today's intellectual and moral climate....That rarest of documents, a genuinely profound book.

Rich and absorbing. . . . A grand tour of the American mind.
"The Washington Post Book World"

"Rich and absorbing. . . . A grand tour of the American mind."
--"The Washington Post Book World"

Brilliant. . . . No other book combines such shrewd insights into our current state. . . . No other book is at once so lively and so deep, so witty and so thoughtful, so outrageous and so sensible, so amusing and so chilling. . . . An extraordinary book. --William Kristol "The Wall Street Journal ""

"Brilliant. . . . No other book combines such shrewd insights into our current state. . . . No other book is at once so lively and so deep, so witty and so thoughtful, so outrageous and so sensible, so amusing and so chilling. . . . An extraordinary book."--William Kristol "The Wall Street Journal "

About the Author

Allan Bloom was professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. He taught at Yale, University of Paris, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, and Cornell, where he was the recipient of the Clark Teaching Award in 1967. He died in 1992.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140112170
• ISBN 13: 9780140112177
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 402