As the costs and casualties in the culture wars are being calculated, common sense is coming out of a coma. "However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate -- especially in the humanities on campus and in the culture," writes Rachel Donadio in The New York Times. The subtitle of Bloom's book still gives a jolt: "How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students."
Anthony Kronman, a law professor at Yale, shows how colleges, in abandoning the profound questions that have perplexed philosophers and writers throughout human history, have betrayed their students, depriving them of disciplined rumination before they're caught up in the urgent business of adult life. In "Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life," he writes that in emphasizing the secular, professors offer no recognition of the spirit and spiritual values.
It's impossible to read King Lear or Hamlet without questioning the deepest human values. Because John Milton is a dead white man, the erudition of his poetry is discounted (or ignored). The political and religious issues he raises in "Paradise Lost" would animate any discussion of democracy, terrorism and war, but raising questions is not the aim of much that passes for higher education. Milton's debate of the devils over how to perpetuate the war against God, "which if not Victory is yet Revenge," has much to tell us about our own times.
Students arrive on campus yearning to think big thoughts and often get political polemics from little professors with small minds. Tenure depends on publishing articles in arcane critical language in scholarly journals nobody reads. Many teachers are unable and unwilling to teach outside their constricted disciplines.
When I taught English literature to college sophomores in the '60s, attitudes were quite different. We studied the grand sweep of history from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," with all of its human diversity in the pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," with its instructive aridity and spiritual emptiness. Such surveys fell out of fashion, more's the pity. It was a wonderful way to spark curiosity, enabling students to choose whether to probe deeper. Many did. The Bard, dead white man though he was, would understand: Let us not to the education of true minds admit impediments.