My sophomore year philosophy class took a sharp turn and redefined itself around the newly released “Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom. At its simplest, “Closing” says that modern American universities have become sterilized to the point where they only push students toward pretty standard measures of life success, and do little to truly build the critical thinking or passion development that can lead to a much richer life.
This class was wasted on my 20 year old self.
Bloom’s book was intellectually satisfying to philosophers and historians, but in an almost ironic exercise against the backdrop of the book (and because our professor had to generate grades for us) we had to answer questions like “how does Bloom build comparisons between modern university practices and propaganda from the Weimar Republic?”
It should have been a “practical philosophy” course or “personal philosophy”. In great 25+ year hindsight, I wish the first half of the class had been using the book to set a personal urgency followed by weeks of individual exercise to think on how we might craft our own futures without the standard societal milestones. Would we have travelled more? Would we have pursued more passions? Or would we have made choices that we thought would lead to more happiness, but because of the success structure of society we would have pursued short-term satisfaction and given up long term joy. Who knows.
Like many business books and philosophy pieces, the value placed on them ages with time even if their relevance (which I would argue for “Closing”) has only intensified. For me this isn’t just a philosophical rumination on the ineffective impacting of my barely-post-pubescent mind (or probably, mid-pubescent), but rather I am wrestling with my developmental guidance of The Fellas. We’re in the throes of “my third grader got a B- in sixth grade level reading in his gifted program” and I rotate between “who gives a shit, he’s an eight year old reading a Harry Potter book every three days”, “what ‘more’ can we do with him to increase his appreciation of the more sophisticated themes of ‘The Half Blood Prince”, and “why are we talking about this instead of his general disdain for team sports?”. Weekly I get “you’re in tech, what programming classes are your kids taking after school” and the answer is “none, every year I pay my developers less as coding becomes easier and more overseas schools get better”. I don’t say that, I say I’m more focused on other areas right now.
I see my friends who get their kids into Princeton, or NU, or Harvard and then also my friends who don’t and I wonder how much of the “success” is for the kids and how much for the parents. The Elder has a buddy who didn’t get into the gifted program, but can now add a series of ten three-digit numbers in real time. I see it and give the required parental response of “ooh, he’s so smart”, but I’m really thinking “it’s just a trick like you might train a monkey to do, with zero real world value. Who doesn’t use Excel? or now Alexa?”. I think “this is a trick that makes you feel good as a parent, like when I taught my five year old to sing the National Anthem.” I should have spent that time teaching The Younger about the values that led to the writing of the Star Spangled Banner and how we might make them part of our day-to-day. I want to say to the Indian family with their math wunderkind “why did you spend the 100 hours of what I assume was unpleasant ‘practice more’ interactions on that instead of learning to cook the local dishes of your home Indian region that he has increasingly no connection to?” While I do feel comfortable being an asshole from time to time, I can’t imagine this is a productive place to say something like that. The Elder is buddies with a kid with a straight-from-central-casting Tiger Mom who has her boy up on chess, chorus, after-school math, weekend Chinese (in addition to the increased work load of the gifted program) and was giving her boy a “you must focus, you must try harder ” pep talk…and I just wanted to ask “does that ever work with your eight year old?” And then I want to say “none of that relentless programming is getting your kid into Harvard in 2027. He needs to show he can ‘create’, not ‘learn’. The applicant class is full of perfect learners.” I’m sure some of that is first generation immigrant perspective versus I’ve-been-around-for-generations-white-dude perspective.
If I try to put The Fellas on the path to becoming second generation Wildcats, I am playing into the standard success model that Bloom highlighted and also setting a goal based on 1990s success patterns. I know that the number one place that Google hires engineers is San Jose State – which is nowhere on any of my Silicon Valley parent friend’s radar as an aspirational target school. In my day, your school was the first screen, then your grades…and that was driven in part by the fragmentation of job seekers and job opportunities. Has LinkedIn and Monster broken that paradigm outside of roles that demand prestige as part of their offering (e.g., companies still like that their McKinsey team is full of Harvard/Stanford grads)?
Open questions in my ongoing battle against the Closing of the American Mind and quest to create the greatest potential for happiness for The Fellas.