R.R. Reno wrote about Allan Bloom’s book, Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, on its twentieth anniversary in 2007.

The most important question in peoples lives—that is to say, the question of how they should live—remains largely unconnected to the sophisticated intellectual training that continues to take place in the classroom. I can often get students to “share” their moral “opinions,” and often with a certain warmth of conviction. I can also get students to analyze classical arguments for or against various accounts of the good life. But I find it difficult to induce students to take a passionate and rational interest in fundamental questions.

I am most interested in the students who are wounded and unmoored by the this kind of training or the atmosphere in which it takes place. Some students may be able to withhold their moral convictions in college and keep them intact, but some lose those convictions through a lack of exercise. If they do not actually lose them, they may find them shifted by the many sympathetic voices for immorality among their peers.

Quoting John Paul II, Reno states, “We should beware ‘an undifferentiated pluralism,’ he writes, for an easy celebration of ‘difference’ undermines our desire for truth and reduces everything to mere opinion.”