American students enter university virtually ignorant of the foundational texts of the Western intellectual and literary tradition. While their European counterparts learn about the major philosophical and literary movements of the West during secondary school, American youth are vastly inferior to their transatlantic peers in cultural knowledge and sophistication. For a brief period in the 1950s, during Bloom’s early years of teaching, he was impressed by the enthusiasm his best students showed for humanistic learning when they encountered European philosophy, art, and literature for the first time. This moment of intellectual enthusiasm was perverted, however, by the political activism galvanizing university campuses in the sixties, which exhausted the moral energy of students and faculties alike. 

The succeeding generations of students are more ignorant and intellectually lax than ever before, Bloom claims. Nietzsche’s insight that the decay of culture entails the constriction of the human soul seems borne out by the state of American education and domestic life. Two major factors in the American character contribute to this decline; both are rooted in the devaluation of books as repositories of truth. First, American identity has never been based on a shared cultural or literary tradition. Tocqueville notes in Democracy in America (1835-40) that America was a nation without a book, unlike the French or Germans, rooted in rich cultural, historical, and linguistic traditions.