There is, we are told, a crisis in this country's colleges and universities. There are too many courses - most of them of an increasingly specialized nature - and too much choice for the student, resulting in a curriculum that is incoherent and devoid of content. This has reached the point, so the critics charge, where the very idea of a liberal arts education, the education of the whole person, is in jeopardy. The only way to resolve this crisis, they claim, is for colleges and universities to return to an education based on the classics, the Great Books of Western Civilization.
Perhaps the most influential of these critics has been Allan Bloom, whose passionate commentary on the shortcomings of contemporary education, The Closing of the American Mind, topped the best-seller lists for months on end. Bloom charges that the majority of courses offered by the top colleges and universities in the United States “are parts of specialties and not designed for general cultivation, or to investigate questions important to human beings as such” (p.340). The unpalatable truth, he says, is that increasing specialization has so emptied the curriculum of content that the nation's elite schools can no longer “generate a modest program of general education for undergraduate students” (p. 340). Thus, in claiming to offer a distinct program of liberal education, they are in fact “perpetrating a certain kind of fraud” on their fee-paying clients (p. 341).
According to Bloom, the only viable solution to this curricular crisis is the Great Books approach. Instead of subjecting students to a welter of different disciplines, we should be reacquainting them with the intellectual tradition that forms the basis of our culture. No amount of tinkering with the current curriculum will achieve this, Bloom maintains, since the problems are symptoms of a deeper malaise, a pervasive shallowness of mind in American society. The only cure for this is a radical surgery on the liberal arts curriculum this means cutting back the existing thicket of courses and reinstating “the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts” (p. 344). By “classic texts” Bloom means such books as the Bible, Plato's Republic, and perhaps works by Aristotle, Hobbes, Shakespeare, and Rousseau, although little hangs on exactly which texts are included in this list. The important thing is to require all students, no matter what their intended major, to study these classics. And this means, Bloom insists “just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the methods of approaching them, … trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read” (p. 344). It is only in such a meeting of minds with the great authors of the past, he contends, that students will find a true remedy for the relativism and cynicism about traditional values that form their common intellectual baggage when they arrive on campus.
This is clearly a controversial diagnosis of the current state of liberal arts education. It has been widely influential, but not because Bloom musters any very compelling arguments for his position. Indeed, as some of his sharper critics have pointed out, his book contains very little in the way of explicit argument at all. Certainly Bloom does not feel compelled to defend his conception of the Great Books approach at any length - the discussion from which I have gleaned the above synopsis occupies no more than a few pages near the end. Largely abstract and rhetorical, his argument does not address such obvious questions as how the Great Books approach
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