printed with information and knowledge while attending college.
Bloom blames American universities for doing a poor job in providing students with a general education including an education in the classics. He suggests that colleges and universities are "diploma mills." He laments the fact that universities are so busy packaging their curriculum to attract and retain students and student-athletes that they have abandoned the idea that a well rounded student with a strong moral base and an academic knowledge of the classics is better prepared to handle whatever major they have chosen, and whatever career choices they make after college.
Bloom suggests that the purpose of a university education is, or should be, to develop students into well-rounded individuals with an understanding of the world around them. Bloom writes that political correctness has cowed student and instructors from expressing opinions that are out of fashion, or even questioning the legitimacy of those selected opinions that have been elevated into revered positions in the current political environment of the nation, or of the university.
Bloom comments that courses in Western Civilization have been under constant attack for decades. He suggests that understanding of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Jefferson were once among the defining characteristics of a well-rounded college education. Bloom observes that many universities do not even bother to present the great works and the great lessons of Western civilization. He adds that these works have been crucial to the growth of individual freedom in the United States. S.J.D. Green writes in Antioch Review that Bloom points to a particular irony and hypocrisy in which administ
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