The family requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of
the heavens and of men. The parents must have knowledge of what has
happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order
to resist the philistinism or the wickedness of the present.
The family...has to be a sacred unity believing in the
permanence of what it teaches. … When that belief disappears, as it has,
the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness. People sup
together, play together, travel together, but they do not think
together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let
alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration
they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as priests,
prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success
are all that they can imagine.
-Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind, p. 57, 58
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