Elites used to understand and respect ordinary Americans — before the Left destroyed education
In 1987, Allan Bloom wrote “The Closing of the American Mind,” a warning that “higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students.” Bloom’s book landed like a bomb in the middle of the culture wars of the 1980s, as he contended that the top universities in the country were no longer giving their students the type of education they needed in order to protect and preserve the best aspects of American culture.
At the time, there were major fights over many aspects of the curriculum, all centered around one basic question: whether the brightest young Americans should be trained in a shared culture that would expose them to the best of this country and Western civilization.
The election of Donald Trump should be a wake-up call to every elite institution in the country, from The New York Times to Harvard.
In general, of course, the Left won those wars. The college freshmen who were 18 years old in 1987 are now 47 years old — meaning that relatively few people under the age of 60 received a solid grounding in the humanities of the type Professor Bloom thought were essential. READ MORE
