What We Don’t Know The Closing of the American Mind <i> by Allan Bloom (Simon & Schuster: $16.95; 385 pp.)</i> : Cultural Literacy: <i> What Every American Needs to Know by E. D. Hirsch Jr. (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95; 237 pp.)</i>

Education reform is high on everyone’s list. But where to start? What to do? What exactly has gone wrong? The authors of two recent works express profound distress at the decline of our intellectual legacy and offer potent suggestions about how to reclaim it. Their counsels differ, however. One, a political philosopher, gives an explanation of the meaning of liberal democracy and describes the fundamental attitudes, ideas and institutions it requires. The other, an English professor, proposes a national vocabulary, a set of basic concepts and information to be mastered by every high school student, to insure a minimally literate citizenry.

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom argues that liberal democracy is in crisis because its intellect is disintegrating. The university, liberalism’s core of independent, rational thinkers, has collapsed. In its place are a diverse collection of specialists--in the professions, the sciences, economics, business, the social sciences and technologies of all variety. They speak obscure and truncated languages, promote insularity and jealously guard their disciplines. Inquiry, reflection and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are no longer virtues. “These great universities,” writes Bloom, “--which can split the atom, find cures for the most terrible diseases, conduct surveys of whole populations and produce massive dictionaries of lost languages--cannot generate a modest program of general education for undergraduate students.”

Bloom has taught “advantaged youths” in the nation’s best universities for 30 years. Highly intelligent, materially well-off and free to study whatever they want, they have been “those most likely to take advantage of a liberal education and to have the greatest moral and intellectual effect on the nation.” Unhappily, he concludes, 200 years of liberal education have imparted only nihilism, uncertainty, a leveling of the intellect and the rejection of reason.

In his elegant, passionate, wide-ranging, repetitive, abstract, philosophical, brooding “meditation on the state of our souls,” Bloom reports that today’s best and brightest know and care little about life’s deeper meanings. He finds them “spiritually detumescent,” flat-souled, inhabiting a world “unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals.” American intellect, he argues, has been reduced to the level of popular culture, to egotism, to the immediately pleasant, the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral.

The irony is that these transient values were fostered by the very ideals that produced America--freedom, equality and individual rights. The fault is not the students’. It lies with thinkers who substituted the desires of the multitude for the rule of reason, who adopted relativism, openness and tolerance as guides to truth, who agreed to teach the useful arts and to ignore philosophy. Liberal democracy and scientific achievement produced a bourgeois society, an aggregate of self-interested consumers whose progeny attend college not to learn, but to get MBAs. What went wrong?

The biggest mistake is in thinking of the university as an “economic resource,” a factory for producing doctors, lawyers, scientists, social workers and teachers. Rather, the progress of liberal democracy should be measured by its commitment to maintaining institutions that are independent and devoted solely to the life of reason and free inquiry. Without such institutions a society invites tyranny, both of the right and the left, which is what is happening today.

What recommendations does Bloom make? Universities should seek to unify their divisions and promote an overall understanding of the nature of man and reality. They should promote tradition and respect for the past, for the classics, for the great unifying theories of Newton, Aristotle, Hegel and Plato. Universities are both the guardians and progenitors of civilization. They provide a young mind with its only opportunity to see beyond itself, to ask the larger questions, to expand its awareness of life, mind, history, society, art, civilization and knowledge. None of this can be done when the focus is on training people for careers.

Few can argue with Bloom’s sentiments and observations, though fewer will be able to follow his traversal from Greek philosophy through Enlightenment ideals and German thinkers to our present woes. But his prose is rhapsodic, compelling, personal and reassuring. He writes from a deep love of history and intellectual tradition. It is unfortunate that the readers to whom his book is addressed will be most apt to dismiss it.

E. D. Hirsch’s proposal is more concrete because it is more concerned with symptoms than disease. In “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” he puts forward a list of nearly 5,000 names, concepts, historical persons and events, and scientific and literary terms. These represent “what literate Americans ought to know to achieve the levels of communication” demanded by modern society. Hirsch argues that it is because of the adoption of certain Enlightenment values that we have become a nation of nonthinkers. Social scientists accepted Rousseau’s notions about the “natural development” of children, and educators embraced Dewey’s view that education should emphasize creativity, not “content.” As a result, we have wrought a nation of people who, if they can read and write at all, have nothing to say. Their thinking is undeveloped because they have no information with which to form opinions, no larger framework within which to deal with ideas, events and challenges.

Hirsch is to be applauded for his ambitious if fanciful proposal. Can’t we admire a family whose dinner conversation includes the Battle of Hastings, the fourth estate, atmospheric pressure and the meaning of “ships that pass in the night?” But what would become of democracy if all children were like that?