Education Quote by Allan Bloom

Bloom is smuggling an old-fashioned moral ambition into the bland bureaucratic word "education". He refuses the modern promise that schooling is mainly credentialing or job prep; instead, he frames it as a kind of inner archaeology. The key move is "whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion": students aren’t empty vessels to be filled or customers to be satisfied. They arrive with partially formed longings - for meaning, coherence, excellence - that institutions can either cultivate or anesthetize.

The subtext is a critique of late-20th-century higher ed, especially the shift toward relativism, specialization, and therapy-speak comfort. Bloom implies that the university has stopped taking seriously the idea that a human being can be "completed" by contact with demanding ideas. His language pointedly avoids "skills" and "outcomes". "Completion" suggests telos, a directedness of life, which is exactly the kind of claim modern pluralist campuses often treat as suspect or oppressive.

Yet Bloom also hedges against authoritarianism: the aim is to "reconstruct the learning" that lets students "autonomously" pursue that completion. He’s arguing for a curriculum that awakens desire and supplies intellectual equipment - not indoctrination. The rhetorical finesse is in pairing yearning with autonomy: education should intensify the ache for something higher while refusing to dictate its final shape.

Context matters: Bloom, famous for The Closing of the American Mind (1987), wrote amid culture-war anxieties about canon, virtue, and the purpose of the university. This line distills his wager that liberal education is less about information than formation, and that the most radical thing a school can do is treat students as souls capable of being made whole.