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Michael Kadish
The chapter "Books" must have seriously offended this student. She is so eager to clear herself of Bloom's scorn, to turn the tables to him, and to simply find to be an "elitist snob," that she doesn't understand the points that Bloom is trying to make.
By "proving" himself to be an "elitist snob," in the second paragraph, she quickly tries to turn her essay into a counter-rant of Prof. Bloom's. Her first main argument against books is to point out, "look, we do read, but not your books...." She then goes on to insult his position of only accepting the "old literature." But, in his essay, Prof. Bloom never insults modern books He never said anything like, "Any book written after Victoria died isn't worth the paper it's printed on." The point of his essay was to show that students don't read and understand enough. He insults Salinger and Rand not necessarily because they are contemporary, but because, in his opinion, their books are professing the pop philosophies that he dislikes. Whether his classics did this as well, is a valid question, but this is never brought up in her response. The fact that she picks The Lord of the Flies as her proof that literature still survives, actually gives credit to Dr. Bloom's complaints. It's not a bad book, but if this is the best contemporary book she can use to show that modern books still show insight into human actions, than quite certainly, she is showing that students do not read enough.
She then goes on to prove HIS point more. His main statement of the essay was "Gen Xers don't read enough good books, and they don't fully appreciate what they do read." A rebuke of hers to him is that, we've grown up. We've found more important things than books. "This is life and there are events in our lives in which books can not tell us what to do or how to feel." I question that statement, but regardless, she is proving his exact two points right there. First, they\we don't read enough good books, she agrees with, and then, after that, by ignoring his statement that the classics, "could teach anything about the relations you want to have, or will be permitted to have." (In fact, putting two and two together here, if she's saying on the one hand that modern books are just as good as their ancestors, and at the same time, that we cannot learn all our lessons from books, she is inadvertently demonstrating that contemporary books are not as good, since they cannot "teach anything about the relations you want to have, or will be permitted to have.")
She again misses his point to his quote, "the...common student view lacks an awareness of the depths as well as the heights, and hence lacks gravity." Her response is to somehow paraphrase that into, "[students'] views don't count simply because [the students] ... don't think like [Prof. Bloom.]" He did not say that, he said that students do not fully understand what they read. She proved him right with an incredible case in point.
Towards the end, she actually gets as bad as he did, claiming superiority. "The simple truth is that we students of today have so many more concerns about life, the world, our environment, that we must be able to relate to our own society through a variety of works and ways." She seems to ignore that Prof. Bloom, when he was a "student of today," was living through the Second World War, and had presumably already gone through the Great Depression. To end her essay saying that she lives a more concerned life than Prof. Bloom did, is not merely a cop out, it is being presumptuous about her generation, to the extant that she accuses Dr. Bloom of.