The closing of the American mind, through students' diction & grammar

A few years ago, soon after I moved to Oregon, I got an appreciatory email from a student.  But, I simply could not broadcast that email because the student had erroneously written there how much he "had taken for granite" the things I did and said.

Such errors are no mere slip, like how me might end up with the word "pubic" when we meant "public."  These errors are way more than mere laugh lines and are indicative of something seriously wrong.  A selective listing of errors in this essay might make you smile and chuckle, but should simultaneously worry you.

To their credit, students are often frank when it comes to admitting their shortcomings and attitude problems. Like the guy who owned up to doing "halfhazard work." Or the one who admitted that he wasn't smart enough to go to an "Ivory League school." Another lamented not being astute enough to follow the lecture on "Taco Bell's Canon" in music-appreciation class.

Given the ivory tower of higher education, well, Ivory League School sounds right to me :)

All the more important then Allan Bloom's work becomes.  Sean Collins writes that Allan Bloom and his seminal work cannot be simply pigeonholed; the debate has become that way only because the left and the right are both being selective in how they (ab)use The Closing of the American Mind.  Bloom, he writes, wants to:

uphold liberal education, and yet our modern notion of such an education was the product of the Enlightenment, of which he is highly suspicious.

That, in a nutshell, has been my complex relationship with higher education. 

Collins further notes:

Bloom writes that openness is an essential feature of the academy: ‘The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the non-instrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt.’ However, over time openness was transformed into a mindless relativism: ‘Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.’ If the university preaches that all truths are relative, what’s the point of searching for truth? Openness, ironically, leads to the ‘closing’ of the American mind. 

The closing of the mind gets reflected even in the casual attitudes we adopt when students do not display the levels of thinking and writing.   Perhaps we are taking higher education "for granite" :(