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.