W obronie edukacji liberalnej (liberal education) – na kanwie rozważań Allana Blooma

Abstract

The article presents a concept of the liberal education whose supporter and propagator was an American political philosopher, Allan Bloom. Its Authoress refers to Bloom’s work The Closing of the American Mind where he deeply analyzed standards of the American education on the higher level. Facing threats which he saw in the academic life, he took a position that the only solution of that problem was to create a good basis of philosophical and humanistic studies, that required an authentic study of the history of great philosophical questions and problems as well as proposed answers to them. Bloom wanted to recover an ideal of man educated by great literary works and books of the great thinkers. He was an adherent of returning to education in liberal arts. That type of education was called by him as the liberal education, where the word „liberal” was used in a sense of the liberal arts. Besides a short characteristic of his liberal education Authoress also shows a way how Bloom was criticized by opponents of that model of education. He was accused of traditionalism, conservatism, fundamentalism, political dogmatism. Anyway, as Authoress claims, views on the education, presented in The Closing of the American Mind, were not based on any political doctrine. For one can find in Bloom no clear political program. He decidedly defended an education against so presently characteristic politicization that threatens its autonomy. He maintained that universities should have become schools of independent thought, where to search the knowledge was a purpose in itself, and referring to the temporality of social or political life in no way.