Bloom's Educational Philosophy
Bloom: Educational Philosophy
Nature of education
Education is not real or meaningful if it does not respond to a felt need. Education must be in response to a need of humanity.
Timeless questions
What each generation is can best be discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind.
Liberal education
Bloom’s philosophy promotes liberal education as the route to human completeness.
Higher education
Bloom focused on university-level education, which he believed had deteriorated owing to social and political issues of the time.
Relativity of truth
Every student entering university, Bloom observes, believes that truth is relative despite their varied ethnic, cultural, social, and political backgrounds.
Education of openness
- Relativism is treated as necessary to openness.
- This openness is treated as a virtue.
- The purpose of education becomes not creating scholars but providing students with moral virtue: openness to truth.
Democratic education
- Bloom believed prevalent democratic education needed to produce men and women with the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime.
- This education evolved from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality in the last half-century.
Bloom’s critique of openness
The education of openness rejects natural rights as flawed and regressive. It takes into account the relativity of truth and is open to all life-styles and ideologies. Bloom treats this as a failure rather than an achievement.
Bloom’s educational philosophy is best understood as a sustained engagement with two questions: what should real education respond to, and what has actually happened to American higher education under the doctrine of openness? The article works through his answers.
The nature of education
Bloom’s foundational claim about education is that it must respond to a felt need. Education that does not is not real or meaningful, however successful it appears by external measures. A school can produce graduates with credentials, marketable skills, even cultural knowledge, but unless those graduates have responded to genuine human needs through their education, the education has failed at its most basic test.
The felt need is not just an individual student’s preference. Bloom means the permanent concerns of mankind: the questions about meaning, truth, the good life, the nature of human existence that every serious person eventually faces. Education that responds to these is real. Education that ignores them in favour of more comfortable substitutes is not.
The implication: what each generation is can best be discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind. A society that takes the permanent concerns seriously produces one kind of generation; a society that has abandoned them produces another. The character of any generation is, at root, the character of its engagement with the deep questions.
Bloom’s philosophy promotes liberal education as the route to what he called human completeness. A liberally educated person has engaged with the permanent concerns and has therefore developed in ways that vocational training alone cannot produce. The goal of education, for Bloom, must be this completeness, not the narrower goals of skill or credential.
He focused his attention on higher education in particular. The earlier years of schooling were not where he saw the main failure; the university was. American university education had, on his account, deteriorated owing to the social and political issues of the time. The deterioration was at the level where it could do the most damage, because it was at the level where students were supposed to engage most seriously with the permanent concerns.
Education must engage with the permanent concerns of mankind, the deep questions about meaning, truth, and the good life
The felt need is not just an individual student’s preference; it is the genuine human need to engage with the questions that every serious person eventually faces. Education that ignores these in favour of credentials or marketable skills is not real education, however successful it appears by external measures. What each generation is can best be discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns.
The education of openness
Bloom’s most discussed contribution is his diagnosis of the education of openness that dominated American universities by the late twentieth century. The diagnosis has three connected claims.
First, every student entering university by Bloom’s day believed that truth is relative. The belief was nearly universal, regardless of the student’s ethnic, cultural, social, or political background. The relativism was the air the students breathed; it had been transmitted through schools, media, and the wider culture so thoroughly that students arrived at university already convinced.
Second, the universities had adopted openness as their cardinal virtue. Relativism was treated as necessary for openness: if any truth claim were taken seriously, the result would be intolerance toward those who held other claims. Openness required treating all positions as equally legitimate. This openness was then promoted as a virtue, perhaps the chief virtue, of the educated person.
Third, the purpose of education had shifted as a result. The aim of the university was no longer to create scholars who engaged seriously with truth; the aim was to provide students with a moral virtue, namely openness to truth. The shift sounds modest. Its consequences, Bloom argued, were large.
The shift produced students who could not actually engage with any serious position because their commitment to openness required treating all positions as equally good. The depth that real education needs (the willingness to take a position, to defend it, to revise it under pressure) was missing. The students were tolerant of everything and committed to nothing. The university had successfully produced openness; it had failed to produce education.
Bloom’s education of openness analysis was sharply critical of what he saw as the failure of democratic education in its late form. Prevalent democratic education was supposed to produce men and women with the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the previous half-century, the model had evolved from the education of democratic man (a citizen with civic capacities) to the education of democratic personality (a person whose character traits matched the democratic ideal). The shift, Bloom argued, had hollowed out what democratic education was supposed to be.
The education of openness rejected natural rights as flawed and regressive. It was open to all kinds of people, all life-styles, all ideologies. The opening sounds generous. Bloom treats it as a failure, because the openness includes openness to positions that themselves close down the open inquiry the education was supposed to be promoting.
A doctrine that treats relativism as necessary for openness and openness as the chief virtue of the educated person
Universities had adopted openness as their cardinal virtue: any serious truth claim was treated as intolerant, so all positions had to be treated as equally legitimate. The purpose of education shifted from creating scholars who engage seriously with truth to providing students with the moral virtue of openness. Bloom criticised this because it produced students tolerant of everything and committed to nothing; the depth real education requires was missing.
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