Howdy, Allan Bloom
Hey guys, reminder: keep blogging. Although, if you aren’t, you probably won’t get this reminder.
What would Bloom say about an education like St. Johns?
It’s truly a higher education.
Specialization isn’t important.
Graduating with a liberal arts degree doesn’t mean you’ll end up working at McDonald’s.
Even with a specialized degree your options may be limited/non-existent. (Then we chatted about how hard it is to get a job, even with a good education.)
Different Philosophies of Education
IdealismBloom, Plato
Essentially the idea that the good and true things in the universe are not material, they are ideals
Focused on texts and conversation (dialogue) to get at the important things in life.
The people who are read (like Plato, Shakespeare) deal in concepts and ideas.
In the classroom you read texts and talk about them. Methodology of question and answer (Socratic method). Everyone has the potential to access these ideas. Teaching is what helps people to access these ideas.
Realism Aristotle; fundamentally science
The real and good and true ARE material, and the material things are important.
We should investigate these things through the scientific theory.
Classrooms are more lecture-focused.
The goal of the realist teacher is to get students to understand the world.
Pragmatism Peirce, William James, Dewey
American contribution to Western philosophy
Education is at its center.
In certain ways very realist: very concerned with the material world, but not in the way realism is. Concerned with consequences and problem solving.
Ideas have physical consequences. It matters what you think about something because it determines what your actions are.
Existentialism Camus, Sartre
20th century philosophy that denies that there is meaning apart from human beings.
Concerned with making meaning in a world that is meaningless.
Student choice and the arts—all very important in making meaning for ourselves.
Marxism Marx (!)
Sees the fundamental and defining feature as our relationship to economics, our relationship to material things.
Some people are involved in the production of material things, other people work for them
Schools are institutions set up by producers to train the workers. (Which is why Marxism is critical of schools.)
Post-Modernism
Rejects blanket statements (i.e. post-modernists resist totalizing narratives: narratives that explain everything via a few simple things).
Multiple versions and multiple stories of things that are going on, cannot accept an overwhelming idea.
Has gone from a philosophy to a literary style.
Conscious of itself.
Critical self-awareness and irony built on the idea that there is nothing real.
How does post-modernism influence education?
It’s influenced educational theory, not really practice.
People are more aware of and critical of the way schools prioritize certain groups to the exclusion of other people.
Emphasis on difference—in a classroom each student is different with unique standards, goals, etc., different groups (racial, gender, ethnic, etc.).
Everything has political dimensions—personal is political
e.g. Queer Theory—heterosexuality had become the default; others were ignored/discriminated against.
e.g. Feminism
Normal is a function of the majority of the environment.
In case you aren’t sure about post-modernism, think about reality TV (i.e. The Real World, esp. season six, Boston), or go here.
And Kyle, in case you need more information about modernism, this is for you.
Bloom and Religion, Bloom and Travel, Bloom and Moral Distinction
What is Bloom’s take on religion?
It causes you to think about your actions; it gives you depth.
The focus isn’t so much on religion as on the benefits of religion.
The Bible as a representation as truth.
Open interpretation would be relativism.
Against this idea of a relative truth.
Should we take this as a literal interpretation of the world?
The Bible is a good example of what Bloom is talking about.
Literature read as the author intended it to be read; authorial intent is very important.
Bible gives common perception of what is good and what is bad; provides a common moral framework.
Reference point in what to strive toward. There is a goal/reward.
The Bible is serious and we ought to read it, if we’re going to read it, as a serious text that deals with serious issues and seeks to answer questions that all humans have. We must interrogate it, as we would do with any text, in order to delve into the search for answers.
Bloom would probably have a problem with the “wishy-washy Christians,” claiming a belief set without associating the obligations of inquiry and discipline that such a belief set requires of you.
Everyone should be interested in the Bible because it contains answers to the search for meaning. They may not be the right answers, but there are answers. Discovering them is part of the inquiry process that leads toward truth. If you engage in an open conversation regarding the answers revealed by the Bible, you are participating in that inquiry and therefore Bloom approving of the Bible as a component in the search for truth.
Bloom and Travel
Don’t be a tourist, be a scholar
We don’t invest in the culture; we bring our culture to theirs and do the compare and contrast.
Ethnocentrism and travel: we aren’t ethnocentric enough, we don’t have a good basis of love and appreciation for our culture/heritage.
Fundamentally impossible to immerse ourselves into other cultures, and we should leverage that heritage to learn what we can when we’re abroad. That involves more than just trying food; it involves figuring out what makes these people tick.
People are going to go about their search for “the good life” their own way, and if they use travel to help supplement their quest for “the good life” it can be worthwhile, but if we do other things, it can be another exercise in meaningless consumerism.
Fundamentally the point of travel is learning about other places, you learn more about yourself because you’re forced to encounter different versions of things you know.
Bloom and Moral Distinction
Does schooling need morality? Does Bloom agree with the teaching/inclusion of morality in school?
Equivocation of religion and morality—they often go along together, but they don’t have to. A moral education can be found in the canon.
We don’t read the canon to find clear moral lesson. Moral issues can be raised by the text, but the evaluation and implementation of these morals is our own. The struggles are consistent human themes, and good education addresses these themes and how they make us human.
Natural science:
Rules the university
Based on things that deal in truth/proof.
The social sciences try really hard to be like natural sciences.
The problem is that most of those things deal with human beings, which are harder to predict than animals and nature.
The humanities aren’t taken seriously enough and are being marginalized by the universities.
When the humanities became relativistic, they lost their power, because what people are really after is truth.
This makes Bloom angry, because the natural sciences are limited in their truth, what it means to be a human, which is what the humanities originally addressed.
A college of education doesn’t even show up on Bloom’s radar, because it’s basically a vocational school.
The problem is that education isn’t doing a good job of answering the fundamental question every human being is trying to figure out, which is how to be a human being.
The goal of education ought to be to encourage the search for the good life in every human being, and we’re not serious about finding it because we’re too open to any and all possibilities (no drive).
2 comments:
Excellent notes. I enjoyed the humor and the links are helpful.
Thanks for the shout out and info.
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