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Theme Of Specialization In Brave New World

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Bloom’s Eros
Specialization is not one of the major themes in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. However, I find it necessary to address what Bloom calls eros. In my opinion, this is a very important term that has to be dealt with in order to reasonably discuss the impact and role of specialization in today’s society later on. Bloom describes a person’s eros as “the enticing awareness of incompleteness and the quest to overcome it (p.132)”. The longing for intellectual completeness, according to Bloom, is also the longing for education. He claims that in today’s world, students may become competent specialists in their field, but becoming flat-souled is the price they have to pay for it (p.134). Students are so focused on a certain …show more content…

In addition, the paragraph on Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind introduces the term eros, the longing for knowledge and intellectual completeness, which will be crucial for analyzing the different forms of specialization in the present.

Specialization in Today’s World
First, I will focus on how career related specialization ties into the concept of eros, the longing for truth and knowledge as outlined by Bloom and Socrates. I think that many students spend most of their time with education and figuring out what to do to fit into society; they become specialists in meeting the demands and requirements that society imposes on them. Students go to class every day, listen to the teacher lecture, study for quizzes and tests because good grades are necessary to get a desired job later on. This effort is wasted when not much later on …show more content…

We are, for example, only interested in reading books for pleasure, for recreational purposes, but not in books from which we could learn. Also, for younger generations, the interest in history and other cultures is declining. The majority of people do everything in their power to get comfort and “happiness”. They leave the house in the morning, go to work to do their job, come home at night and sit down on the couch and watch TV or browse through the Internet. Just like the people in Brave New World have soma, a drug that lets them forget about any worries that might arise, we have the internet, cell phones, reality TV, video games, and alcohol. After a stressful day, we make use of all these things without realizing their power over

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