The Closing Of The American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy And Impoverished The Souls Of Today's Students
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Paperback. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
A landmark in American intellectual life, The Closing of the American Mind presents a searing critique of the modern university and the cultural relativism it has come to champion. Allan Bloom, a distinguished political philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, argues that the abandonment of a classical liberal arts education — grounded in the great books of Western civilisation — has left a generation of students intellectually adrift, morally unmoored, and incapable of genuine self-reflection or civic virtue. With sharp wit and unflinching conviction, Bloom chronicles the erosion of rigorous academic standards and the rise of a campus culture that prizes openness above all, yet paradoxically closes itself off to the very ideas that once animated Western thought. Written with the authority of a scholar who spent decades in the American classroom, the work draws on Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche to illuminate what Bloom sees as a civilisational crisis hiding in plain sight. With a foreword by Nobel laureate Saul Bellow lending further literary gravitas, this book ignited a fierce national debate upon its publication in 1987 and remains as provocative today as ever — a challenge to every reader who believes education should be more than mere credentialing, and a question that still demands an answer: what, exactly, are we trying to teach?
Author: Allan Bloom
Format: Paperback
Published: 1987, Simon & Schuster
Genre: Education theory
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Paperback. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
A landmark in American intellectual life, The Closing of the American Mind presents a searing critique of the modern university and the cultural relativism it has come to champion. Allan Bloom, a distinguished political philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, argues that the abandonment of a classical liberal arts education — grounded in the great books of Western civilisation — has left a generation of students intellectually adrift, morally unmoored, and incapable of genuine self-reflection or civic virtue. With sharp wit and unflinching conviction, Bloom chronicles the erosion of rigorous academic standards and the rise of a campus culture that prizes openness above all, yet paradoxically closes itself off to the very ideas that once animated Western thought. Written with the authority of a scholar who spent decades in the American classroom, the work draws on Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche to illuminate what Bloom sees as a civilisational crisis hiding in plain sight. With a foreword by Nobel laureate Saul Bellow lending further literary gravitas, this book ignited a fierce national debate upon its publication in 1987 and remains as provocative today as ever — a challenge to every reader who believes education should be more than mere credentialing, and a question that still demands an answer: what, exactly, are we trying to teach?