How we lost our cultural literacy
It’s the education, stupid.
A while back I wrote a post that mentions a book by E. D. Hirsch entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know:
Written in 1987 (the same year as Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind), it warns that, in the name of multiculturalism, American education had already failed to teach students the heritage and culture basic to Western civilization and being Americans.
The book contains some interesting research on how that happened and what the results were, and it’s quite persuasive about much of this, although it doesn’t go into the politics of it very much at all.
Here’s one of the main theses of the author (which he supports by citing studies that back his statements up):
Disadvantaged first-graders do as well as middle-class ones in sounding out letters and simple words. What happens between first grade and fifth grade to change the equality of performance?…Although our schools do comparatively well in teaching elementary decoding skills, they do less well …in teaching the background knowledge that pupils must possess to succeed at mature reading skills.
In other words, Hirsch says that kids from richer and poorer families start out roughly equal in skills, but since schools fail to demand that children learn facts that would help them understand what on earth they’re reading, the poor kids quickly fall behind because they don’t get that background information from their environment. This may sound like some sort of excuse, but it’s not; as I said, he mounts some fairly persuasive evidence that it’s at least a large part of the story (or that it was by the 1980s, when the book was written).
When kids are learning to read from texts such as “Dick and Jane played with Sally” (yes, I know they don’t use Dick and Jane any more, but you know what I mean) there’s not much context they need to understand that isn’t well within their easy reach. When they’re in junior high and high school, and they are reading a passage about the Civil War, Grant, and Lee (for example), it helps to know there was a Civil War, when it happened, what the issues were, and who the major players might have been. These need to be firmly in place before the children can understand what they read. And the lack of specific knowledge is cumulative, because the children who lack it fall further and further behind because they don’t want to read things they don’t understand, and more and more things become things they don’t understand.
How did it get to this point? Hirsch writes (my observations in brackets):
In a study of American school materials of the nineteenth century, Ruth Miller Elson found an almost complete unanimity of values and emphases in our schoolbooks from 1790 to 1900. They consistently contrasted virtuous and natural Americans with corrupt and decadent Europeans; they unanimously stressed love of country, love of God, obedience to parents, thrift, honesty, and hard work; and they continually insisted upon the perfection of the United States the guardian of liberty and the destined redeemer of a sinful Europe. [It kind of turned out that way, too, just a few years later, didn’t it?]
…as Elton has shown, the contents of American schoolbooks of the nineteenth century were so similar and interchangeable that their creators might seem to have participated in a conspiracy to indoctrinate young Americans with commonly shared attitudes, including a fierce national loyalty and pride.
I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy, I’d call it a choice and a plan. Hirsch again:
The decline of American literacy and the fragmentation of the American school curriculum have been chiefly caused by the ever growing dominance of romantic formalism in educational theory during the past half century [that’s as of the 80s, when the book was written]…
…Educational formalism holds that reading and writing are like baseball and skating; formalism conceives of literacy as a set of techniques…a skill…[and that] the specific contents used to teach “language arts” do not matter so long as they are closely tied to what the child already knows, but this developmental approach ignores [the] important point that different children knows different things…[current textbooks’] “developmental” approach contrasts sharply with textbooks from earlier decades, which consciously aimed to impart cultural literacy….
Hirsch charts differences in educational recommendations between an influential report issued in 1893 and one from 1918, during which time the philosophy of education in the US changed from content-based to skill-based, from content and subject matter they wanted taught to social adjustment skills they wanted to impart.
He says it was “a deliberate challenge to the 1893 report and to conservative school practices generally. …The origins of these new aims were European romanticism and American pragmatism.”
…[John] Dewey and his followers agreed further with Rousseau and Wordsworth in scorning secondhand, bookish education. Dewey attacked the abstract, rote-learned material of literate history, which he considered to be, as Wordsworth puts it, “a weight/Heavy as frost and deep almost as life.”
[They felt]…the most appropriate replacement for bookish, traditional culture would be material that is directly experienced and immediately useful to life in society.
The 1918 report rejected the Latin and Greek that had been a bulwark of education till then. It also changed the earlier idea that everyone should take the same curriculum, in favor of the idea that some students should just have a vocational program. Also, history became “social studies” (that’s what I took in grade school; in high school it was “history” again).
So, what about today’s Common Core? That’s another huge topic, too big for me to tackle at the moment, but you’re welcome to do so in the comments section. I will mention, though, that Common Core talks a lot about skills to be mastered, and there is no recommended curriculum of texts, although there are suggestions that students “read a range of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informative texts from an array of subjects,” and there is an appendix with “”exemplar texts” that are suggestions. However, each district and/or state decides the details.
There is some critical content for all students ”“ classic myths and stories from around the world, foundational U.S. documents, seminal works of American literature, and the writings of Shakespeare ”“ but the rest is left up to the states and the districts.
Common Core had been harshly criticized for many things. I think if the goal is to take education back to imparting cultural content, that could be good (I’m not at all sure it is). But the larger question today is who would be in charge of that content, and what should the content consist of? The consensus of 1790-1900 described by Hirsch is long gone—in part because of the changes brought to education during the ensuing twentieth century.
> “Dick and Jane played with Sally”
I actually forgot how to read after first grade because the content was boring. I learned again when I was nine in order to read science fiction.
> Common Core had been harshly criticized for many things. I think if the goal is to take education back to imparting cultural content
I suspect any cultural content it seeks to impart is the inherent evil of heterosexual white men and the burden they owe to everyone else.
momo:
As I wrote, the question is “who would be in charge of that content, and what should the content consist of?”
If the Right chooses only one cultural arena to compete where defeat is not an option, it should be academia and, if you consider it a separate arena, education. It’s source, vector, and incubator.
The self-defeating reticence by conservatives to compete vigorously against leftists for dominant control of the American campus is appalling, tantamount to surrender of the cultural zeitgeist.
I continue to be amazed at the difference in literacy between people in the past with very few years of formal education (or non) and today.
My Grandfather(s) had only a limited amount of formal education (sixth grade at best) but continued to learn through their lifetimes. Their reading, writing and historical knowledge were up to anyone’s standards.
It was the value accorded to knowledge in general both it’s utility and status. If you cannot do this by the end of grade school you have failed.
The self-defeating reticence by conservatives to compete vigorously against leftists for dominant control of the American campus is appalling, tantamount to surrender of the cultural zeitgeist.
I’m not sure it’s a “reticience” to compete so much as it is being overwhelmed. An article at The American Spectator on John Dewey shows just how firmly entrenched that leftist control of education is:
Emphasis is mine.
Odd, isn’t it, that Elson dates the change to circa 1900.
What else was born then?
Progressivism. Ta-Tah!
“The self-defeating reticence by conservatives to compete vigorously against leftists for dominant control of the American campus is appalling, tantamount to surrender of the cultural zeitgeist.”
Really?? Have you ever tried it?? Have you ever tried to change a campus where you are less than 1% of the faculty?? I’ve done my part only to be beaten down (verbally and socially), ostracized, held off of major committees, etc., and then see nothing changed.
Until the percentage of conservatives on faculties reaches at least 30%, it’s a lost cause. And that won’t happen because the hiring process is such that anyone who is conservative and applies will be quickly eliminated from the candidate pool once that is known.
Eric, physicsguy:
I agree that education is key.
But I agree that the right would have a much harder time taking it back than the left had in taking it over. Simply put: the right really did favor diversity of opinion, and therefore did not see that letting in the left was tantamount to letting the camel get its nose in the tent. The left will not make that mistake; they mouth platitudes about diversity, but they want unanimity of thought in the groves of academe.
Also, as Allan Bloom so brilliantly described, the right (and academics in general) bowed to pressure and threats from the left back in the 60s, and surrendered. The right is not quite as willing to use pressure and threats, and the left is nowhere near as willing to capitulate to them.
“The 1918 report rejected the Latin and Greek that had been a bulwark of education till then. It also changed the earlier idea that everyone should take the same curriculum, in favor of the idea that some students should just have a vocational program.”
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” — Woodrow Wilson “The Meaning of a Liberal Education” An Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association – January 9, 1909
Nobles and peasants, elite and peons or nomenklatura and droids… “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”…
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.“ – Robert A. Heinlein
It seems like we do have ways to augment if not supplant what is taught in the schools, especially for younger children. Churches and other private groups could make sure that books are available to kids. Single moms could be taught how to help their kids learn to read and invited to join bookclubs where they learn about things they were never taught in school. Outdoor activities for kids, like butterfly and bird watching, could be supplemented by books on the topic, so that kids who have a real interest have a chance to dig deeper on their own without having to worry about tests. And I think cooking also gives an opportunity to learn about food, where it comes from, eating traditions of other countries, and some of the basic math involved in doubling recipes.
There are so many adult groups that might be willing to have a 2-week daytime summer camp for kids where they could plants some seeds for learning. Clearly, we can’t get rid of the teacher training baloney in a short time, but we could work with small groups of kids and hope that they will take their knowledge to their peers.
The site INVISIBLE SERFS COLLAR gets deep into commoncore.
Frog Says:
January 26th, 2016 at 5:19 pm
Odd, isn’t it, that Elson dates the change to circa 1900.
What else was born then?
Progressivism. Ta-Tah!
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Then you missed it.
The BIGGEST change maker was “Time and Motion Studies.”
Yes, it came out and made a HUGE impact in the first decade of the 20th Century.
It’s also termed Taylorism by way of its progenitor: Frederick Taylor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study
Taylorism is the keystone upon which ALL other progressive notions rest.
Somehow that keeps getting lost in the shuffle.
Taylor’s world view was that blue collar and skilled tradesmen were COGS to be tweaked in the production machine.
They were to be MICRO MANAGED.
That last aspect was a fundamental for Taylor.
Dewey just took Taylorism to the school room.
Slogans like: “Getting the maths right,” derive their potency directly from the empirical tabulations of Taylor.
The new wave Hollerith punched card permitted remote presumption — to boot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card
Remote presumption comes directly from the ability of centralized bookkeepers to rapidly tabulate all manner of correlations — many of which are total nonsense — a fact that is not apparent to a remote viewer.
Remote presumption is also the flaw in tabulation-grandiosity.
It’s the sin of thinking that if you can tabulate something that you actually know something.
Would counting the stars increase human knowledge?
They are tabulated.
No-one is more smitten with tabulation-grandiosity than Hillary.
Hence, her self-descriptor “policy wonk.”
Tabulation grandiosity is so logically blinding and emotionally gratifying — it’s a narcotic.
One thing to keep in mind is that Socialism does NOT SCALE WELL.
That’s why the Spartans and the Nordics can appear to have successful highly socialist — even totalitarian societies.
(Iceland being a modern extreme.)
All are so small that EVERY White native has common DNA.
Iceland is an oversized village.
Now that they’ve (fatally) let in the Muslim hordes — an extremely violent racial pogrom is inevitable.
It will be started by either faction. But it will be started.
Once the Norse begin cutting loose — now no longer Christian — the bloodletting will be epic — even by Muslim standards.
My money is on the Norse.
They will go feral — a notable feature of the Nazi state.
It’d be EASY to envision America going all feral.
Victimizing Whites is THE way to do it.
You might note that tabulation-grandiosity is also pandemic on Wall Street and Big Banking.
See “The Big Short” to see what remote presumption did to the entire financial universe — less than a decade ago.
It’s STILL running riot.
I may have mentioned this before, but in my recent English classes at community college, this book came up briefly. I noticed, because I had read it (I thought it was quite good). The instructors were aware of it and were quite negative about it.
Simply, they didn’t like the idea of a canon of dead, white men.
Strangely, we, with all the diversity, have achieved the problem Ludwig von Mises saw with compulsory and public eduction in polyglot areas. He saw the education creating conflicts and, even war. Not unlike what we see in the battles over what is to be taught in school these days. Near homogeneous areas avoided this problem. The common culture of what made Americans American, even those of non-European lineage, as we are a country based on a philosophy rather than ethnicity may have mitigated this problem longer in the US.
Diversity actually undermines the idea of compulsory public education. I don’t see the complete abandonment but vouchers with minimal restrictions may be the future. Assuming the special interest of educators is overcome in the interest of the children’s futures.
In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.
Mises, Ludwig von (2010-12-10). Liberalism (p. 115). Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition.
This is why people homeschool.
Neo
One problem I have with that statement is that while there were conservatives on campus in the 1960s, liberals were still in the majority. Back in the 1950s, what politician did academics adore? Adlai, not Ike. By and large the administrators in the 1960s who caved into the demands of the far left were liberals. Recall that SDS types back then would say “liberal” as it it were a curse word- those hated administrators who were largely liberal.
Moderate leftists- liberal- administrators- caved into far leftist students.
physicsguy
What you state is sad, but true. They are not going to hire conservatives.
The bursting of the college tuition bubble may provide some assistance. Most of the administrative bloat added in the last 50 years acts as enforcers for leftist agendas- diversity, what have you. Get rid of that administrative bloat- looks like a quick and easy way to bring college tuition costs down. Get rid of the studies departments in the interest of cutting the fat out- which will also get rid of more enforcers of leftist agendas.
Gringo:
Academics in general caved. I don’t know exactly who was on left and who on right, but there were a lot more people on the right back then (perhaps not a majority, though), and (at least as Bloom describes it) very few held out. That means that I’m pretty sure that a lot of people who caved were at least somewhat on the right.
I certainly don’t have figures for that, though. So I could be wrong. But I doubt the right held firm as a unit. That’s not my impression from Bloom’s book.
Hard to remember, isn’t it, that one of the most popular books of the ’50s was a celebration of the Americanization of immigrants — Leo Rosten’s “The Education of Hyman Kaplan.”
Neo is certainly right that it was the ’60s that killed education my junior high and high school (I graduated in 1964) were devoutly American. If any of the educrats could see those schools, our assemblies, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, gym with real sports and real teams competing, their hair would burst into flames.
The Department of Education has to be the first one to go!
BTW, expat, all that stuff about teaching kids to read, teaching their parents to care about their education, giving them access to books, that’s all WHITE PRIVILEGE, so knock it the hell off!
I’m sorry Richard. I’ll enroll in a diversity course so I don’t make the same mistake again.
You know what I really find tragic: ater college, in the late 60s and early 70s I worked for the welfare and health department in North Philly. It was my first exposure to large numbers of blacks (and Jews and city folk), both clients/patients and co-workers. We could actually talk to one another without having the racist epithet thrown out. It was just assumed that we all had different backgrounds and experiences and it was great to share them. That atmospher changed as the radical chic let the Panthers et al take over.
I had a client who had moved into a apartment above a soul food take out. It had become the go to place for the radical chic who attended summer concerts at the Robin Hood Dell down the street. I always chuckled to think of of the number of roaches they had in their meals because that was the filthiest most infested apartment I had ever seen. The client moved out shortly after, and I don’t think anyone else moved in.
When my granddaughter was seven, she remarked that the Fourth of July was my birthday and my father’s birthday, “because you fighted in the war”.
Far as I can tell, she put together the notion of our country, the necessity to fight various wars, the Fourth as a birthday, connected the Fourth to the guys who fought the various wars and metaphorically figured we could call it our birthday. She knew about our real birthdays.
While I’m impressed with the subject of her observation, I’m even more impressed with the number of things she knew and the connections she drew.
She had some pretty good insights for her age and in no conceivable construction of public education could she have gotten them at school by that age.
Her intellectual environment is so good it might be ruled illegal. But it’s just college-educated parents who have jobs but they freakin’ care and they know what to do. They talk about things all the time.
My DiL was a high school English teacher. I asked her if she’d encountered Benet’s “The Devil and Dan’l Webster” in any of her courses or anthologies.
Nope.
I’ve got some old high school anthologies which include it.
I’m sorry for our country that it’s no longer included, but you’d have to know a couple of things to really get it and those aren’t taught, either.
Accident? Call me paranoid, but I never thought it was inadvertent.
My son is currently in a California High School and is a Junior this year. In his American History class they skipped the Civil War section entirely.
David,
That is appalling. Of course, then they might have to cover the meaning of the Gettysburg address. We can’t have that, can we?
expat — or Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, or the fact that 365,000 Union soldiers died to end slavery. No, no, NO!, not allowed — it doesn’t fit with the narrative!
Richard Aubrey Says:
January 27th, 2016 at 8:47 am
It’s intentional rather than inadvertent. But that view isn’t surprising from me.
Geoffrey Britain Says:
January 26th, 2016 at 7:02 pm…
Nobles and peasants, elite and peons or nomenklatura and droids… “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”…
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.“ — Robert A. Heinlein
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Molly Brown Says:
January 26th, 2016 at 11:44 pm
This is why people homeschool.
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Pretty much says it all.