Bloom The Closing Of The American Mind

What You're Actually Looking For

There is no single tool, product, or methodology called Bloom The Closing Of The American Mind. This phrasing conflates two completely separate things that share only a last name. On one side you have Bloom's taxonomy, the educational classification system created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. On the other you have The Closing of the American Mind, a 1987 cultural critique by Allan Bloom about higher education in the United States. Mixing them together won't break anything, but it also won't get you useful results. If you came across this search term somewhere and are now confused like I was the first time I saw it, here's what's actually out there and how to find what you need. This is a framework for categorizing learning objectives. It was developed by Benjamin Bloom and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The original version had six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The revised version from 2001 by Anderson and Krathwohl changed the nouns to verbs and reordered them slightly: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.

People use it in curriculum design, test construction, instructional planning, and assessment rubric development. It's standard practice in teacher certification programs and instructional design workflows across the US and in many other countries. The taxonomy itself is in the public domain. No license, no subscription, no download required. You can find the full framework documented in the original 1956 handbook or the 2001 revision. I've used it extensively when building course outcomes and writing exam questions. The practical part where people trip up is distinguishing between the "analyze" and "evaluate" levels. In the revised taxonomy, analyzing means breaking material into parts and figuring out how they relate. Evaluating means making judgments based on criteria and standards. When I was designing a college course a few years back, my initial draft questions for the evaluation tier kept accidentally landing in the analysis tier. The fix was checking whether each question required a judgment against an explicit standard, not just a breakdown of components. Questions that said "compare" or "distinguish" were analysis. Questions that said "justify" or "recommend" were evaluation. That distinction matters because assessment validity depends on it.

The Closing of the American Mind

This is a book. Allan Bloom wrote it while he was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. It became a bestseller and a cultural flashpoint. The core argument is that American higher education has lost its commitment to the pursuit of truth and that relativism has hollowed out the liberal arts tradition. Bloom draws heavily on classical philosophy, especially Plato's Republic, and he spends significant time critiquing what he sees as the consequences of postmodernism and extreme relativism in academia. The book is dense. It's written in a style that assumes the reader is familiar with Western philosophy. It's not a practical guide. It's a philosophical argument about culture and education. If you're looking for something actionable, this isn't it. I ran into the intersection of these two things once when a colleague asked me to map a reading list for an intro political philosophy course onto Bloom's taxonomy. They wanted to know which levels of cognitive engagement each assigned text would hit. The workable approach was to treat Bloom's taxonomy as the lens and Allan Bloom's book as the content being analyzed. The Closing of the American Mind itself doesn't prescribe any learning objectives or assessment methods. It makes arguments. You can certainly build questions about those arguments at different taxonomy levels, but the book won't do that work for you.

Where to find resources

For Bloom's taxonomy, the revised 2001 version is the standard reference. The original 1956 book is titled Cognitive Domain: Handbook I. The Anderson and Krathwohl revision is titled A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing. Both are available through academic publishers and most university libraries. There are also free summary sheets and infographics online from education departments, though the accuracy varies. For The Closing of the American Mind, it's published by Simon and Schuster. It's widely available in paperback, hardcover, and eBook formats. The ISBN for the 1987 first edition is 978-0671644647.

Common mistakes people make

The biggest one is treating Bloom's taxonomy as a rigid hierarchy where you must master each level before moving up. That's not how it works in practice. The levels describe types of cognitive processing, not prerequisite stages. You can evaluate something without having formally "remembered" every detail about it first. Real instruction blends these processes constantly. Another mistake is assuming the taxonomy is neutral. It isn't. The framework reflects a particular philosophical stance about what counts as knowledge and thinking. Critics have pointed out that it privileges certain kinds of analytical reasoning over creative or emotional modes of engagement. If you're designing a course around literature or performance, the taxonomy can feel awkwardly constraining. I've seen people force creative writing workshops into an "apply" or "create" box when those categories don't capture what the students were actually doing. In those cases I dropped the taxonomy framing entirely and used a different assessment model. With Allan Bloom's book, the common error is reading it as a straightforward political argument. It's not. The philosophical references run deep and the prose assumes familiarity with Plato, Nietzsche, and Rousseau. Without that background the book reads like a series of disconnected complaints. The worthwhile approach is to read it alongside secondary critiques and responses, particularly the ones from educators who actually teach the courses Bloom was criticizing.

When these tools fall apart

Bloom's taxonomy doesn't scale well to interdisciplinary or problem-based learning environments where the objectives are emergent rather than pre-defined. I tried applying it to a service-learning course where student goals shifted based on community partner feedback. The framework kept colliding with the reality that we couldn't predict what "knowledge" or "skill" would matter until mid-semester. We ended up using a reflective journal model instead, which turned out to be more honest about what was happening. The Closing of the American Mind has a more fundamental limitation. It was written in 1987 and its diagnoses don't account for the massive changes in higher education since then — the rise of online learning, the shift in student demographics, the financial pressures on institutions, the transformation of academic publishing. Some of Bloom's observations remain sharp. Others feel dated because the landscape they were diagnosing has changed in ways he couldn't have anticipated. Reading it without that historical context gives you a book that's equal parts insightful and frustrating. If you're looking for a single unified theory that combines educational assessment design with cultural criticism, you won't find it here. These are two separate things that happen to share a surname. Knowing which one you actually need is the first step.