Opening Shot

The “closing” Bloom described was essentially a dumbing: not Mozart but Andrew Lloyd Webber, not Jane Austen but Stephen King, not Plato but Jacques Derrida. Or worse. Underlying all these fallings-off, for the philosophically trained Bloom, was the ascendency of Friedrich Nietzsche and his deconstructionist followers, heirs of a radical skepticism inaugurated in the late 17th century by John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. The skeptics’ purpose was to disqualify the certitudes of Plato, the Hebrew prophets, and the Christian theologians, who held that divinity—its attributes and laws—not only existed but could be known. 

Philosophers call this view “foundationalism,” as in Thomas Jefferson’s references, more deistic than Jewish or Christian, in the Declaration to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” and to people being “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Jefferson was a dues-paying member of the Enlightenment, but as a moralizing deist he had drawn a limit to skepticism—as, indeed, had John Locke, who, though nodding to revelation, defended a moralizing Christianity on grounds almost entirely rationalistic. 

Enlightenment thought was complicated, but, beginning in the late 18th century, philosophy’s Romantic, antifoundational tendency was toward simplification. God was either nonexistent or inconceivable; the good, our notion of proper conduct, was whatever individuals or particular groups said it was. People should, insisted the Romantics, be free to do as they like, or even to try to persuade others to follow their example. But farewell to all notions of absolute, divine sponsorship, vouchsafed either through the revelations of sacred scripture or through irrefragable argument.

Allan Bloom was appalled by the upshot. Like his Victorian precursor Matthew Arnold, he deplored the “anarchy” of “doing as one likes”—each class devoted to its own politics, entertainment, forms of worship—as an affront to “culture,” defined by Arnold not just as “the best which has been thought and said” but (to certify its being best) in tune with “reason and the will of God.” A student of Plato and a nonbelieving Jew, Bloom emphasized the rational, not the divine, foundation for culture. He didn’t expect his students at Cornell or the University of Chicago to suppose that they could fully embrace the truth, but he did encourage them to think that striving for full embrace was worthwhile—was, indeed, the right way for them to use their minds.

Now, under the title The State of the American Mind, Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow have collected 16 essays that, with a little fudging, might have been called The Closing: A Generation On. Most of the contributors would agree with Bloom’s paradox: that Americans have closed off avenues for their minds—no striving after eternal truths for them—because of anti-foundational philosophers’ insistence that, absent eternal truths, it’s better to keep an “open mind” on all subjects, especially moral and artistic ones. 

Not sure about the rightness of same-sex marriage, abortion, or affirmative action? The common liberal counsel is to declare such questions undecidable and keep an open mind, since opinions about ethics and aesthetics are forever changing. The majority, voting with their attention spans, will give us their pro tem judgment. But the resulting quarrelsomeness—these likings against those, all bound to shift in a few decades or years—has turned a public square in which partisans, agreeing to disagree, used to debate each other into a new Vanity Fair: all those booths filled with cliques facing not outward but inward.

“Why,” critics of Bloom and Hirsch asked a quarter-century ago, “should a black sophomore study the Mayflower Compact and Walden in high school, instead of something out of her own culture?” A good question, Bauerlein and Bellow admit; but in trying to become more inclusive, educators have “cherished the pluribus and abandoned the unum.” Factions of the pluribus, commonly defined by race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, complacently regard themselves as right while dismissing their opponents—not fellow citizens engaged in debate, but “enemies”—as agents of irrational fear: homophobia, biphobia, Islamophobia, negrophobia, technophobia, etc. 

With the American mind in such disarray, with the passionate partisans calling each other names and the more responsible afraid to criticize lest they be thought judgmental, Bauerlein and Bellow advance their book as a set of critical judgments of the horribles in our schools, personal habits, and political behavior.

There are chapters, heavy with statistics, about the twitterocracy, the decline of creditable middlebrow fiction, welfare dependency, and so on. Since, however, our everyday personal habits and periodic political choices depend on what we know, this book’s most fruitful diagnoses and prescriptions center on education. Bloom died in 1992, but Hirsch, now in his late-80s, has fought on. Here, in an introduction titled “The Knowledge Requirement,” he patiently iterates the claim he’s set out over the past two decades: that K-12 students do better when asked to master what he calls “core knowledge”—not just in mathematics and science, but in history and literature. 

The key is reading. Test scores fell dramatically from 1962 to 1979 and have been flat since. Why? It’s not because of television and the pervasive corruptions of popular culture. Other countries’ children are distracted by the same things, but their reading scores didn’t fall when ours did, and they haven’t fallen since. The culprit, as Hirsch all but proves, is our emphasis on child-centered pedagogy—a nice-sounding antidote to memorizing and regurgitating “mere facts”—that derives from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the English Romantics, and, at the beginning of the 20th century, John Dewey. 

Dewey’s progressive approach to education hoped to bring disadvantaged kids—racial minorities, recent immigrants, the poor generally—into the middle-class mainstream. Get students out of their orderly rows, show them “loving sympathy,” give them activities wherein they would “learn how to learn,” and the rest would follow “naturally.” Progressivism dominated the new teacher-training institutions in the 1920s and ’30s, and teachers thus trained gradually filled openings as the old guard retired. By the time the first baby boomers finished high school, their test scores showed that the progressive, child-centered instruction hadn’t worked as planned.

Hirsch’s corrective? Heed the findings of cognitive psychologists, who have demonstrated that reading comprehension improves when students have a knowledge of context: interrelated information specific to a writer’s subject, be it beekeeping or baseball, the Civil War or wagon trains. At the numerous but scattered schools where a cultural-literacy core drives instruction, a curriculum that, step by step through the grades, builds kids’ knowledge base has narrowed the gap not just between their test-takers and those from other countries but, more important, between their own advantaged and disadvantaged test-takers. 

That is true progressivism: a program that provides equal opportunity regardless of who a student’s parents happen to be. The irony, as Hirsch laments, is that his fellow liberals, the left-wingers who oppose his core because they think it reactionary, are the real reactionaries, for they are keeping the disadvantaged from climbing the “class ladder.” (It is not all that difficult, in my experience as in Hirsch’s, to compose a curricular list with which teachers of markedly different backgrounds and political persuasions can live.) Hirsch writes: 

It’s gratifying that, among recent defenders of the Common Core state standards, E. D. Hirsch is at last being regarded as an ex-pariah. Too bad, however, that those standards don’t identify essential curriculum content. This leaves schools free “to do what they’ve always done,” Hirsch said last year. “I hate to be a godfather of something that is not going to work,” he said, adding that the popular coupling of him with Allan Bloom was “bad luck.” For while he himself is “practically a socialist .  .  . Allan Bloom really was an elitist.” No matter. Intellectuals in search of common standards are endeavoring to help people understand each other in public discourse and compete with each other as equals.

And that means not just learning to read but learning to write, a task Gerald Graff turns to in “Why Johnny and Joanie Can’t Write, Revisited.” Graff, whose Professing Literature (1987) remains the best history of American college English departments, has in the interim addressed practical pedagogical problems. What to do about culture-war disputes as they affect the teaching of, say, Huckleberry Finn or Heart of Darkness? Don’t let students game the system by offering remarks and term papers flattering to what they can tell is their professor’s preferred take. Instead, make competing approaches the focus of the class. On this occasion, Graff advances a teaching-of-writing approach that mirrors my own—although I haven’t achieved the pithiness of his “They Say/I Say” meme: What matters in academic writing, and in almost all writing, is the ability to put the writer’s own insights (“I Say”) into dialogue with other people’s insights (“They Say”). Don’t worry, at first, about idea development, organization, voice, diction, fluency, grammatical and rhetorical conventions; concentrate, instead, on teaching students to summarize someone else’s argument, explanation, comparison-contrast, description, analysis, or narrative, and to “use that summary to motivate their own.” They will then 

Regarding the opposition as interlocutors rather than as foes would be easier if discussions were about ideas not emotions, programs not passions. But as Dennis Prager shows, “We Live in the Age of Feelings,” where rational, not to mention religious, authority is despised and rejected, while doing what makes one feel good is the first and seemingly only thing that counts. Prager calls this method of making moral decisions “emotional relativism,” according to which any reference to 

Feelings, particularly, of love. Many of us are loath to challenge the Amor Vincit Omnia legion, but, as Prager notes, it’s “guileless” to decide the issue of, say, same-sex marriage on a simple “appeal to love, not to anything fundamental about marriage, family, sexuality, children, monogamy, or the state.” How can critics of gay or lesbian marriage deny the partners’ love? If love is the sole criterion, Prager continues, the fact that “their wedding entails redefining marriage by gender for the first time in Western history” is beside the point. Shouldn’t we, as Prager suggests, be thinking as well as feeling our way forward, especially with regard to marriage, family, sexuality, and children—and also to the philosophical and theological reasonings that, for millennia, have underpinned these institutions, categories, and practices?

Consider Barack Obama’s you’re-on-your-own caricature of Republicans in 2012: “If you are out of work, can’t find a job, tough luck, you’re on your own. You don’t have health care; that’s your problem. You’re on your own.” As Prager notes, the president is converting 

It’s apparently too much to acknowledge that conservatives are concerned not just with preserving the lives of the unborn but also with bringing the poor into the middle class. The question is: Which policies will accomplish that? 

The same, finally, with affirmative action. Liberals seem to be incapable of granting that those questioning the results of affirmative action—in college admissions, for instance—are doing so not because they are racists but because (like Hirsch with his core-knowledge curriculum) they want to give the disadvantaged a truly equal opportunity to pursue happiness. 

Thus, when some researchers at Duke noted that minority students (many of them, per objective admissions criteria, “mismatched” at Duke from day one) were opting out of scientific, mathematical, and engineering fields into softer humanities and “studies” programs, the Black Student Alliance and black alumni protested. This, as Prager recounts, was all that Duke’s president, Richard Brodhead, needed to express “dismay” at how “generalizations about academic choices by racial category can renew the primal insult of the world we are trying to leave behind—the implication that persons can be known through a group identity that associates them with inferior powers.” 

As he protested against negative stereotyping, Brodhead phrased his remarks carefully. But his “feeling” transformation of social science research into a “primal insult” can only confirm students’ don’t-tell-us-about-it! attitude toward evidence that could help educators focus on problems of academic readiness. Emotions drive our desires, of course; but our desires are usually fulfilled only when we have rational, effective policies in place.

To insist on such policies, as all the contributors to this volume variously do, might appear quixotic, especially at a time when mainline religious leaders seem more eager to join than to guide the emotivists who dominate the secular sphere. But, as Prager writes, both religious and secular conservatives have a choice: either wait for the feel-good systems to collapse and their ideas to be revised or even discarded, or go on offense in the “war of ideas and values.” Conservatives can expect the left’s “fevered counterattack”: They don’t care about poor people, they hate gays, they don’t love Planet Earth, and they’re renewing “the primal insult” of categorizing people, in praise or dispraise, by gender, class, or race. Never mind that it was our fellow citizens on the left, half-a-century ago and feeling better all the time, who renewed that primal insult.

Thomas L. Jeffers, who teaches English at Marquette, is the author of Norman Podhoretz: A Biography.