"Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion"
About this Quote
Bloom urges education to locate and cultivate a longing already stirring within students: a desire for wholeness or completion. The language echoes Plato’s idea of eros, a yearning for the good, the true, and the beautiful that drives the soul beyond mere utility. Rather than treating learners as empty containers for information or as future workers to be trained for the market, he asks teachers to recognize an inner teleology, a pull toward a fully formed life.
Completion does not mean conformity or a fixed social role. It suggests the maturation of judgment, taste, and character, the alignment of intellect and desire toward enduring questions. Hence his second demand: to reconstruct learning so that students can pursue this end autonomously. Autonomy here is not drifting skepticism or lifestyle freedom; it is the hard-won capacity to inquire, discriminate, and choose with reference to standards that transcend fashion.
The context is Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a critique of relativism and the eclipse of liberal education by specialization and careerism. He believed universities had forgotten their highest purpose: to open the soul to the great conversation about justice, happiness, and truth. Reconstruction, then, is curricular and pedagogical. It means an education anchored in serious texts and disciplines that sharpen reason, awaken imagination, and test convictions against the best that has been thought and said. It resists reducing learning to skills acquisition or political indoctrination, trusting that students, once equipped, can seek completion without tutelage.
The claim is at once demanding and hopeful. Teachers must discern and protect a fragile desire that students may not yet know how to name. Institutions must create conditions for freedom that are more than permissiveness: structured encounters with difficulty, beauty, and argument. The aim is not to produce compliant technicians but self-governing persons whose pursuit of completion continues long after graduation.
Completion does not mean conformity or a fixed social role. It suggests the maturation of judgment, taste, and character, the alignment of intellect and desire toward enduring questions. Hence his second demand: to reconstruct learning so that students can pursue this end autonomously. Autonomy here is not drifting skepticism or lifestyle freedom; it is the hard-won capacity to inquire, discriminate, and choose with reference to standards that transcend fashion.
The context is Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a critique of relativism and the eclipse of liberal education by specialization and careerism. He believed universities had forgotten their highest purpose: to open the soul to the great conversation about justice, happiness, and truth. Reconstruction, then, is curricular and pedagogical. It means an education anchored in serious texts and disciplines that sharpen reason, awaken imagination, and test convictions against the best that has been thought and said. It resists reducing learning to skills acquisition or political indoctrination, trusting that students, once equipped, can seek completion without tutelage.
The claim is at once demanding and hopeful. Teachers must discern and protect a fragile desire that students may not yet know how to name. Institutions must create conditions for freedom that are more than permissiveness: structured encounters with difficulty, beauty, and argument. The aim is not to produce compliant technicians but self-governing persons whose pursuit of completion continues long after graduation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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