intellectual History: THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, Allan Bloom

Published: 1987, 392 pages

Summary, Lesson Plans: 46 pages, 17,500 words

Critiques/Obituary/Influence: 20 pages,7375 words, visuals

Total: 66 pages, 24,.899 words; visuals. 

MY NOTES:   In 1987, I was at the height of my learning how to be an outstanding teacher.  My students were learning, engaged, capable of reading, writing, speaking and listening. Many of them, I hope, were attending colleges all over the country. All of th students that I have taught were from the lower to middle class.  They were from families  where both parents had not attend or graduated from college.I sharred thies profile with my students who learned how to read, how to speak, how to write and how to listen.

I had been the product of Catholic Schools--when they had real priest, nuns, minor Catholic officials, and my family who helped run the parish.  For High school I graduated from Regis High School for boys, located on the campus of Regis University in 1968 with many honors as a scholar, an athlete, and thinker.  I can say the assassination of JFK was a turning point with all my fellow grads.  I entered Loyola University of Los Angeles as an ultra-prepared scholar.  I ended up tutoring my friends who were less prepared. I had read the classics: in English of course, in Latin, and in Greek.  I was taught Science and Humanities, Philosophy, Religion, Music, Art, community, and faith.I gobbled up information and found my "self" guided by this system.

I taught in Los Angeles Public Schools, Jefferson County Schools, Colorado, and had just transferred to one of the premier schools in Lakewood CO.  I was in leadership positions in my building and negotiated the Teacher Contract and became the Team Leader.  And I had time to read this book.  And Bloom, teaching top students at Yale, the University of Chicago, Cornell, University of Toronto and in Tel Aviv.  He had taught the cream of the cream and declared education dead just as I was celebrating my vocation as a teacher.

I hated Bloom when I read his book.  So I decided to give him a second chance and read and studied it again.  He probably was right.  Just when I was celebrating my students and their climb from Lower Class to Middle Class, Bloom was giving the Last Rites to the American Schools.