Abstract
What image does a first-rank college or university present today to a teen-ager leaving home for the first time, off to the adventure of a liberal education? He has four years of freedom to discover himself—a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate. In this short time he must learn that there is a great world beyond the little one he knows, experience the exhilaration of it and digest enough of it to sustain himself in the intellectual deserts he is destined to traverse. He must do this, that is, if he is to have any hope of a higher life. These are the charmed years when he can, if he so chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.
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© 2005 Lee Morrissey
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Morrissey, L. (2005). Allan Bloom (1936–1992) “The Student and the University,” The Closing of the American Mind (1987). In: Morrissey, L. (eds) Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04916-2_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04916-2_22
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6820-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-04916-2
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