Allan Bloom denounces in "The Closing of the American Mind," the pervasive and mindless relativism which he describes in his writings as having exhausted the American spirit. Bloom asserts that college and university students, even at the most prestige universities are deficient in moral formation, in reading of serious books, in musical tastes, and above all in love. He describes students as shallow, and adds that they have no longing for knowledge or for anything noble or great. Bloom states their minds are empty, and that their character and their bodies are weak.
Bloom is concerned that even American's best and brightest college students enter college believing in ethical relativism รป meaning there are no moral imperatives of moral and ethical absolutes. According to S.J.D. Green, Bloom lavishly praised the stuffy, elitist, and detached academics of the past as good for democracy. He condemned the open, free-thinking, egalitarian university curriculum of the present as being bad for students, bad for society, bad for education and bad for the American democracy. Green offers this clarification: Bloom was never an admirer of American universities. He believed that even Ivy League schools such as Cornell, where he taught, never performed their duty as institutions of higher learning to educate college students well. Bloom added that in his opinion, universities had stopped even trying to educate students (28).
Bloom suggests a cure for America's maladies involving a classical education in which college students are required to confront the challenges of reading and understanding the great books, and understanding the great thinkers of western civilization (14). Bloom suggests that modern students are full of spiritual entropy. He adds that they are scornful of knowledge of culture and history, ill-read, dedicated followers of popular culture, and that they lack the 'clean slate' of previous generations waiting to be im...