journal 1

CHAPTER 2

TEXTUAL AUTHORITY, CULTURE, AND THE

POLITICS OF LITERACY

Since the second term of the Reagan administration, the debate on edu­ cation has taken a new turn. Now, as before, the tone is principally set by ~he _right, but i~s position has been radically altered. The importance of linking educational reform to the needs of big business has contin­ ued to influence the debate, while demands that schools provide the ski lls necessary for domestic production and expanding capital abroad have slowly given way to an overriding emphasis on schools as sites of cultural production. The emphasis on cultural production can be seen in current attempts to address the issue of cu ltural literacy, in the de­ velopment of national cu rriculum boards, and in reform initiatives bent on providing students with the language, knowledge, and values necessary to preserve the essential traditions of Western civilization.1

The right's position on cultural production in the schools arises from a consensus that t he problems faced by the United States can no longer be reduced to those of educat ing students in the skills they will need to occupy jobs in more advanced and middle-range occupational levels in such areas as computer programming, financial analysis, and elec­ tronic machine repair.2 Instead, the emphasis must be switched to the current cultural crisis, which can be traced to the b roader ideological tenets of the progressive education movement that dominated the cur­ riculum after the Second World War. These include the pernicious doc­ trine of cultu ral relativism, according to which canonical texts of 1hc Western intellectual tradition may not lw lwld superior to olhN'>; 1lw

.l·I

THE POLITICS OF LITERACY D 25

notion that student experience should qualify as a viable form of knowledge; and the idea that ethnic, racial, gender, and other rela­ tions play a significant role in accounting for the development and in­ fluence of mainstream intellectual culture. On this account , the 1960s proved disastrous to the preservation of the inherited virtues of West­ ern culture. Relativism systematically downgraded the value of key lit­ erary and philosophical traditions, giving equal weight to the dominant knowledge of the "Great Books" and to an emergent potpourri of "de­ graded" cultu ral attitudes. Allegedly, the last twenty years have w it­ nessed the virtual loss of those revered traditions that constitute the core of the Western heritage. The unfortunate legacy that has emerged has resulted in a generation of cultural illiterates. In this view, not only the American economy but civilization itself is at risk.

Allan Bloom (1987) and E. D. Hirsch (1987) represent different ver­ sions of the latest and most popular conservative thrust for educational rt•form. Each, in his own way, represents a frontal attack aimed at pro­ viding a programmatic language with which to defend schools as cul­ tural sites, that is, as institutions responsible for reproducing the knowledge and values necessary to advance the historical virtues of Western culture. Hirsch presents his view of cu ltural restoration lhrough a concept of literacy that focuses on the basic structures of l,1nguage, and applies this version of cultural l iteracy to the broader <onsideration of the needs of the business community, as well as to the 111aintenance of American institutions. His view of literacy represents ,In attack o n educational theories that validate student experience as a kt•y component of educat ional formation and curriculum develop­ trwnt. For Hirsch, the new service economy requires employees who 1 l\n write a memo, read within a specific cultural context , and commu- 11lc-.1te through a national language composed of the key words of Wt•stcrn cultu re. In the same spirit, Bloom offers a much wider critique of t•ducation . Advancing a claim that schools have contributed to the l1111trumentalization of knowledge and that the popu lation has fallen vlt tlm to rampant relativism and anti-intellectualism, Bloom proposes a ~1•1 u•s of education reforms that privileges a fixed idea of Western cul- 1IU 1' o rganized around a core curricu lum based on the old Great llooks:

Of c mrr<,c, the only serious solution [for reform in higher Pd11c,1tlonf Is almost universally rejected: the good old Great llnok-. appro,l<'h, In which a liberal education means reading e 1 ,1.,111 1w1u 1r,1lly 111c ognl/t•d classical texts, just reading them, lc-111111-( the•111 die I.lie• wh,11 tlw qw•-;lion<, on• and the method of

1

111 IJ 1111 1'111111« 'I I II I lltN

approachi,,g them - not forcing Il11•m 111111 111ft 14111h II 111o1l, 11 up, not treating them as histo rical prodt1111,1 hut 1tyI1111I11 1n11d them as their authors wished them to be ro~1d . • 1h11 111111 thing is certain: wherever the Great Books mako up , cc111Irnl part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satlsrled , feel they are doing something that is independent and fulfil ling, getting something from the university they cannot get elsewhere. The very fact of this special experience, which leads nowhere beyond itself, provides them with a new alternative and a respect for study itself. (344)

w,

This propensity for making sweeping claims without even a shred of evidence raises serious questions about the nature of Bloom's position as well as the quality of his own scholarsh ip. Moreover, Bloom's posi ­ tion is hardly·novel. It has been with us since the Enl ightenment and has long been invoked as an argument for the reproduction o f elites. It is a position that advocates a social system in which a select cadre of intellectuals, economically p rivileged groups, and their professional servants are the only individuals deemed fit to possess the culture's sa­ cred canon of knowledge, which assures their supremacy.

Both of these books represent the logic of a new cultural offensive, one of the most elaborate conservative educational manifestos to ap­ pear in decades. But it is important to recognize that this offensive rep­ resents a form of textual authority that not only legitimates a particu lar version of Western civilization as well as an elitist notion of the canon, but also serves to exclude al l those other discourses, whether from the new social movements or from other sources of opposition, which at­ tempt to establish different grounds for the production and organiza­ tion of knowledge. In effect, the new cultural offensive is not to be un­ derstood simply as a right-wing argument for a particular version of Western civilization or as a defense for what is seen as a legitimate ac­ ademic canon; instead, both of these concerns have to be seen as part of a broader struggle over textual authority. In this case, the notion of textual authority is about the right-wing shift from the discourse of class to the broader relationship between knowledge and power, and the struggle to control the very grounds on which knowledge is pro­ duced and legitimated. What is at issue here is not simply how differ­ ent d iscourses function to reference particular forms of intellectual, ethical, and social relations but how power works as both a medium and outcome of what we might call a form of textual politics.

Textual authority is both pedagogical and political. As a social and historical construction, textual authority offers readers part icular sub­ ject positions, ideological references that provide but do not rigidly

11 It I 1111 11 1 ct I 111 l{,\I ' I 1 '1

11..1, 1111lt1P p,utl, 111 11 Yh •w 1111111• world. A~"' pedagogical practice, the 11".t lw, 111 111• 11•111111111 111!11ply .,~ <• :,ludy in the production of ideology ltul " " p:11 I of ,1 wlcl111 i Ir n 1lI o f power that calls into play broader insti­ l11l lon,1I µractices and social structures. In effect, textual authority rep­ I1•~1•11ls the medium and outcome of a pedagogical struggle over the rnl,il lonship between knowledge and power as well as a struggle over tho construction and the development of the political subject. Need­ l1iss to say, Bloom and Hirsch represent forms of textual authority linked to a cultural practice that have broad implications for educa­ tional re form and for the wider crisis in democracy. We intend to ana­ lyze, in this chapter, the ideological and pedagogical content of these books in the context of the current debates, beginning with an analysis o f Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's critique of American education does not address the indiffer­ ence of schools to the realities of the international marketplace, as in the old technicist discourse that reduces schooling to job training. In­ stead, Bloom attacks modernity, especially what he considers the ram­ pant relativism that marks the last one hundred years of Western his­ tory. Like Jose Ortega y Gasset, his illustrious predecessor, Bloom seeks to restore the dominance of Platonism-that is, the belief in the transhistorical permanence of forms of t ruth - to education. Where President Reagan's secretary of education, William Bennett, and the older elitists reiterated the call for "excellence," but never succeeded in articulating its substance, Bloom presents his proposals in more concrete terms.

Bloom's attack on liberal educational practice and the philosophy that underlies it is a sobering reminder that political and social analy­ ses, which have identified themselves with modernity as a critique of advanced industrial societies, constitute powerful weapons in the hands of both the right and the left. Here we have all the elements of an elitist sensibility: abhorrence of mass culture; a rejection of experi­ ence as the arbiter of taste and pedagogy; and a sweeping attack on what is called "cultural relativism," especially on those who want to place popular culture, ethnic and racially based cultures, and cultures grounded in sexual communities (either feminist or gay and lesbian) on a par with classical Western traditions. For conservatives, each of these elements represents a form of anti-intellectualism that threatens the moral authority of the state. Consequently, much more than eco­ nomic survival is at stake: at issue is the survival of Western civilization as it represents itself through 2,500 years of philosophy, historiography, and literature.

'/1 lJ 1111 1•1111111 1 II llltN

Bloom's sweeping agcndJ i11h•11d1, lo 1•11111111,,11• 111111111 , ,, ,1•rlous object of knowledge. According to Bloom, till'< ul1111,1lt,1 p1·"p1•tllvc is what Plato meant by the allegory of the cave. We art' p111vu11ted from seeing the sunlight by culture, which is the enemy of what Bloom calls "openness." Although vaguely apologetic on the subject, Bloom ends up arguing that Western tradition is superior to non-Western cu ltures precisely because i ts referent is not "cultural" but is the universal and context-free love of wisdom; for the underlying ethic of Western civi­ lization, according to Bloom, is its capacity to transcend the immediate circumstances of daily life in order to reach the good life. Lower cul­ tures are inevitably tied to "local know ledge" - to family and commu­ nity values and beliefs, which are overwhelmingly context-specific. As it happened in the course of history, the Greeks managed to teach some thinkers-Bloom being one-the way to universal truth.

For Bloom, the teachings of Plato and Socrates provide the critical referents with which to excoriate contemporary culture. Bloom sys­ tematically devalues the music, sexuality, and pride of youth, and traces what he envisions as the gross excesses of the 1960s (the real ob­ ject of his attack) to the pernicious influence of German philosophy from Nietzsche to Heidegger as refracted through the mindless relativ­ ism of modernizers. Feminism is equated with " libertinism," or mak­ ing sex easy; "affirmative action now insti tutionalizes the worst aspects of separatism"; and rock music "has the beat of sexual intercourse" and cannot qualify, according to Bloom's Socratic standard, as a genu­ inely harmonic reconciliation of the soul with the passions of the body. Instead, rhythm and melody are viewed as a form of barbarism when they take on the explicit sexual coloration of modern rock music. For Bloom, popular culture, especially rock music, represents a new form of barbarism whose horror he conjures up in the image of a thirteen­ year-old boy watching MTV while listening to a Walkman radio:

He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child w hose body throbs with o rgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism o r the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes

I111 I C ll 1111 t 11 111 11(1\1 \ I l .l'I

11 , h , 111 -.11111 1, 1111• 1, 111,11ll' 11110 ., no1H,lop, commercially11 11 11 p1t p 11 ~ •H••d 111,..,1111h,11lo11,1I l,1111,1-.y. (75)

111i , \ 11 -.011tl11w11ts, In thl!. case, have been shaped by what he per-111 • 11 1v11'l , ,, ltullt ,1tlons of a serious moral and intellectual decline among 1

,11 ,1 111 youth: a challenge to authority formed by the stud~nt move-1111 1111,111" of tlw I960s and the levelin~ ideology of democratic reform 1 h,11,1c tt•ii'>tlc of radical intellectuals.

1ho!iC.' judgments merely provide a prologue to a ~uch more force­ ful ,,ncl unsparing attack on nihilism, w hich '. according to Bloom and hi., political and intellectual peerage, co~s1stently de_values_ s_c_hola_r­ .,11 ,p, or, in its more universal aspect, the hfe of_t~e '.11ind. N1h_1hsm in II loom's philosophy is a code word for the glonf1cat,on _o_f _act'.on an? power and represents the real threat to contempor_ary civ1hzat1on. ~1- hlllsm has a number of historical roots: the modernism of the good life that stresses pluralism and diversity; the vacillations of democracy that )('rmit the ignorant a degree of freedom that, in four undergraduate

1 years, students are not prepared to use; a fragmentat ion born out of the uncertainties of a moral order that cannot present to the young either a unified worldview or goals to overcome the greed of modern

_life; and, in a more politically charged context, the decad_e of the 1960s, which was marked by a flagrant disrespect for authority, espe­ cially the authority of the intellect. Here we have m_ore than_ the usual tepid porridge of conservative disco~rse. Bloom '.nvokes images of "chaos and decay" in the moral fabric of our society. However, the sources of decay are rarely seen to be economic and po litical. l~de~d, there is not a whisper of criticism of capitalis_m. _In fa~, cap,_tahsm appears only as a sidelight in Bloom's rather indirect d1scuss1on of

Marxism. , h1This brief description does not exhaust the breadth of B o~m ~ . y- perbolic tirade. Our concern, of course, is focused on Bloom s v1s1on of the crucial role schools can perform in correcting the cu_rrent state of academic and public national culture he so roundly despises,- Natu­ rally, Bloom does not expect all schools to parti~ipate in reversing <_>Ur count ry's spiritual malaise. The task falls to the l1terall~ twenty or thirty first-rate colleges and universities that are ~les_se? with the best stu­ dents but are regrettably frittering away their mIss1on to restore to the West the mant le of greatness. .

Commanding his minions to revise radic~lly _the curncu~um'. to purge it of allusions to student experience (which, in any case, 1s ~1~ed in ignorance), Bloom seeks to rid the classroom of cultur~I- relativism and of all those areas of st udy that do not venerate t he traditions of the

1

111 11 1111 l'I 11 Ille '• 11t I llllll\1

p•,st. Bloo m's call for curriculum rcforrn Is d1•,11 , I 1111 tit, 1111111 111 tltt• seexual, racial, and cultural revolution lhal anlr11.it11d 1111 • 1•111 •1,111011 11 'v\,.,lno confronted the white men at the Pentagon and at olltrn lnstitu­ ~i,ons of e~onomic, polit ical, and cu ltu ral power twenty years ago. Re- 1rn1tate Latin as the l ingua franca of learning and transmit Western civ­ il iizition through the one hundred greatest books that embody its S)#'!lem of values.

()f course, the state universities and colleges are now populated by th'lecasualties of contemporary culture: large numbers of ch ildren of d iiiiorced parents, who are portrayed by Bloom as unfortunate - even tr;·agic- products of current conditions; blacks and other minorities "V 'hose university experience is " different from that of other students" bE:B".;wse of their history of "disadvantage," and whose dedication is, e:,.,<~pt in rare instances, not to learning but to practical advantage; and di 1spirited faculty members whose dreams of l iving in a community of sc::holars have been destroyed by the "interruptions" o f modern social Problems. For Bloom, these conditions disqualify the state universities a_nio colleges as appropriate sites for professors and students to expe­ rience the awe and wonder o f confronting the "great minds" of the ag;es.

It would be too easy to dismiss th is frankly aristocratic vision of edu­ C:a·tion as simply an effort to establish a new status quo conforming to Cl.ark Kerr's model : a three-tier postsecondary education system in whth theoretical knowledge is confined to the Ivy League institutions an .<l major state universities - principally the University o f California at, <i some of the Big Ten - and private institutions such as Ch icago, t?ute, and Emo ry. But th is would not do justice to the political inte n­ ti04n in the neoconservatives' attack on higher education, or compre­ he nd the danger and novelty o f their argument.

For, un like Irving Kristol's rantings against the 1960s New Left (who "Ve1e trying to create an "adversary culture" in opposition to the su ­ P.-e,))ely democrat ic and capitalist society that had become America), Blc:iom joins Hilton Kramer and t he professors of the Cold War intel li­ g~~tsia of the 1950s in advocating a return to the age of the medieval Sc:J-tnolmen, or at least to the high European cultu re of the nineteenth c:~ n :t.,ry. Rather than praising democracy, he yearns for t he retu rn of a 11'1co1e rigidly stratified civilizat ion in which the crowd is contained ~ithn the land of the marketplace and its pleasures are confined to the ritualsof the carn ival . W hat he wants to exclude are the majority o f thie PC>lflUlation from t he precincts of reason. At the same time, he would dn....,1 the vox populi from the genuine academy where the Absolut:e Sp i it should f ind a home, but does not, because of the confusion that

II H I II II It I I I I111 IC/\1 ' I I II

11 IH"" ,1111hhl the cl,111w 11111 ,111d 11,,ht,y ll1ll11t•11(u o f the discourses of 111 1,,1, 0111111111111•111 , p11l1111 , ,111111•qu,1llly. Uloom identifies the impulse

I•, ,,g,1111,11l.1111.,,11 ' ' "' 111,, c lih•I ( ulprit in the decay of higher learning, as w1•II " " tlio worst lrnp,,i.~l' of democracy. But university administrators 111•,11 oqual rcsponslblllty for pandering to these base motives. Instead 111 lt•1-llr1g bound by tradit ion to transmit the higher learning, which, ,lil(•r sill, is the repository of what is valuable in schooling, they gave 1w,1y t·hc store. Universities lost their way in the scandal that is culture.

Pluralists and democrats might dismiss these elitist ruminations witho ut grasping the valid elements of the complaint. For there can be 111, doubt that the reception that Bloom's book has enjoyed signifies 1ha1 he has struck the elitists' collective nerve. Intellectuals are uneasy ,1bout their role as teachers because their own experiences, interests, ,ind values seem profoundly at odds with the several generations they have taught since the 1960s. But even more searing is their growing feeling of irrelevance, not only w ith respect to the process of educa­ tion, b ut also with respect to their role in public life.

In Bloom's exegesis, the past must p lay a crucial role in the formu­ lation of the future. Intellectuals are to join in a classical evocation of a mythically integrated civil ization that becomes the vantage point from .which to criticize the current situation. In all o f its versions, the inte­ grated past is marked by the existence of a community of the spirit; it is a time when at least a minority was able to search for the good and the true, unhampered by temporal considerations such as making a living. For the idyllic past is always constructed in the images of le isure, or, to be more fair, in an environment whe~e society provides a sufficient so­ cial surp lus to support a priest class, or their secu lar equivalents. In contrast, t he contemporary construction of the intellectual is on the model of technical thought rather t~an pure reason. The intellectual transmits algorithms rather t han ideas, and o rients students to careers rather than criticizing the social structure.

Bloom's attack o n higher education conveniently excludes the de­ gree to which the existing arrangements of social and economic power have contributed to the shaping of the intellectual life that he so stri­ dently laments. What Bloom fails to mention in h is attack on the ser­ vants of higher educat ion is t hat the disappearance of political intellec­ tuals corresponds to the passing of politics from "public" life. Educational institutions, once charged w ith the task of providing a little learning to ruling elites and providing them with a mandarin class, have assumed a crucial p lace in the economic and cultural order. Their task is no longer to preserve c ivilization as it has been defined by the Greek and Roman aristocracies; these institutions are now filled with

I' 1111 l't II lllt 111 I IIINAI

knowlcdge-produu•r s, who, It, ,1dv,11u 1•d 1 ,1pl1,,lI-.1 111 It 11, h,,w Ill' come part o f the process of material and sod.ti r11pr11d11, 111111 I Ir•• ld<•n of the intellectual as adversary of the dominant cultur1• 1-. 11t11•rly for eign to current arrangements (for example, the president of Barnard College, a former corporate lawyer, appeared on television comment­ ing as an insider on the stock market crash and barely referred to her role as educator except to observe that students were calling home and nervously asking their parents, " How are we doing?").

In his last chapter Bloom alludes to business civilization and de­ scribes negatively the way economics has overwhelmed the social sci­ ences in "serious" universities (taking the place once held by sociol­ ogy in the days w hen students desired to help other people rather than looking out for themselves). Sounding like a member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Bloom even manages to criticize the belief, common among natural scientists, that their disciplines yield the only "real" knowledge. Characteristically, Bloom appeals to the elite schools to introduce philosophy as a key component of liberal educa­ tion in order to counter the threat to higher education being posed by the rigid empiricisms of economics and natural science.

The tension between t radition and innovation plagues all who are seriously concerned with education. But Bloom refuses to go beyond scapegoating to ask how classical texts have fai led to address the gen­ erations that came into postsecondary education after the Second World War: why Latin and Greek were no longer deemed essential for even the elite university curricula; why students, administrators, and the overwhelming majority of faculty came to view universities as de­ gree mills, at worst, or at best as places where the enterprising student could be expected to receive a good reading list. These questions can­ not be addressed, much less answered, by invective.

The conservative appeal to the past becomes an ideological flag car­ ried against the future. It is not that the relativists, of both left and lib­ eral persuasions, want to destroy the spirit and form of Western cul­ tural heritage. Rather, they seek to reveal how such a heritage has often been employed as a weapon against those who would democratize in­ stitutions, who would change relations of power. Every achievement of civilization - the pyramids, great works of Greek philosophy and sci­ ence, the wonderful representations of the human body and the soul that emerged during the Renaissance-has been built on the backs of slaves, or on the labor of a faraway peasantry, in short, on a material foundation that undermines the notion of an uncomplicated marriage between high culture and humanism. Ignoring this fact, as Walter Ben­ jamin reminds us, helps to sustain the culture and civilization in

II Ill C11 II I I KA• \ II

H••111•1,,I I t 111 thl11 ,, n 1111 th, 11,1,,,111011 ••H••lmt privilege is frequently ,11, 11111p,111lc•cl lty ,111 ,111 ,, ~ ,111,1111,1 Ilw Intellectuals. What oppressed I 11•11plc• 11r111Pr ,1,111cl 111•!11•1 lh,111 most is that intellectuals are typically ....,v.111I-. of tlw 111IKhly, they ohcn provide legitimacy for deeds of

1.111•, pilv,1tc violonn•, .ind exploitation. This, of course, is the mean­ Ing o( the argument that every achievement of high culture is preceded hy tht' blood of those who make it possible.

When Bloom calls for reviving Latin as a requirement for educated youth, he opposes one of the crucial reforms of the e!ghteenth- and nineteenth-century democratic revolutions: the establ ishment of the vernacular as the language not only of commerce and manufacture but also of public life, literature, and philosophy. His fealty to classical texts excludes the Presocratics and Aristotle and focuses instead on Socrates and his disciple Plato precisely because of their attempt to separate truth from knowledge. Truth in Plato's Symposium requires no external object for its justification but refers instead to itself, particularly to pu­ rity of form. Knowledge is always one-sided, referring to an external object. l t constitutes a representation of things and not, in Pla:o's terms, the things themselves. This distinction was challenged dunng the Enlightenment, when, increasingly, truth and knowledge began to have the same external referent; subjectivity was removed from the realm of science and occupied, as did ethics, psychology, and philos- ophy, a quasi-religious margin. .

The virtue of Bloom's t irade, despite its reactionary content, ,s to re­ mind us of what has been lost in the drive for rationalization, for the supremacy of science over philosophy, history over eternal essences. That is, a twentieth-century obsession, to both define and celebrate history as an evolutionary mode of ideological and material progress produced through the marriage of science and technology, has r~­ sulted in a refusal to give primacy to the important and problematic relationship of truth, power, and knowledge. From the point of view of a conservative for whom the past is all that is worth preserving, the consequences of Enlightenment ideology find their apogee in the bru­ tality of the cultural revolutions of 1789 and 1968; but of course he for­ gets to mention the response of traditional Sch?olmen to Galile~'s dis­ coveries. The intellect, in this case, defends itself by threatening to obliterate its adversaries.

The historical legacy of technicization has been to turn universities into training institutions, which creates few spaces for intellectuals. Within the ranks of the democratic professoriate, a debate often rages between those who spurn the elitism that emanates from the new con­ servative attack on affirmative action, open admissions, and student-

11 11 1111 ,•• >I Ill• '• 1 ,1 1III K I

centered learning, and o lhl1 I1, who would tt y 1111•\l1,111 1111 , 1 ,,,If .,..,v ing hal!-truths from Bloom's critique of coI1tp11II1111,1t ) pn'1l'11•10111l,11y education (for example, open admissions is dc trlmonl 11 lo q11,1llty odu cation, affirmative action is unfairly discriminatory, and so forlh).

What must be accepted in Bloom's discourse is that anti-intellectu­ alism in American education is rampant, influencing even those whos(' intentions are actually opposed to closing the doors to genuine learn­ ing. We know that the environment in most universities is inimical to broadly .based, philosophically informed scholarship and dialogue concerning burning questions of politics and culture. In a few places, !ibe~al and radical intellectuals are building microinstitutions (centers, institutes, programs) w ithin the universities as outposts that attempt to resist the larger trends toward instrumentalized curricula. These pro­ grams wisely accept that they are engaged in an intellectual as well as a political project; but, for the most part, their influence is confined to t he already initiated.

• On the front lines, some teachers, buffeted and bewildered

I con-

tinue to maintain fresh creative and critical approaches to their tasks. In doing so, they receive little or no sustenance from the intellectuals. The challenge, in our view, is to combine the intellectual work of cul­ tural reclamat ion with the work of pedagogy. This would entail a delib­ erate effort to avoid the tendency toward exclusivity on the part of in­ tellectuals; to refuse the temptation to reproduce the "community of scholars'' that is the heart of Bloom's program, even if the scholars are democratic intellectuals. The intellectuals who boldly announce that the search for truth and the good life is not the exclusive property of the right and, in fact, is largely opposed to the conservative sensibility, would be required to engage with students - to start, not from the new great texts, much less from the old great texts, but from the texts of the vernacular experience: from popular culture, not only in its written forms but in its visual artifacts as well. As Bertolt Brecht quipped, "Let's start not from the good o ld th ings but from the bad new things."

This need not imply leaving aside any considerat ion of the tradition. But the task of reworking it might be expl icitly combined with current concerns. For if tradition is to become part of a popular canon, it would have to justify itself either by its claim to pertinence or as a so­ ciological and historical trace of the culture against which the present contends. In this connection, it is instructive to follow the fate of sci­ entific texts. Except for h istorians, practicing physicists and their stu­ dents rarely, if ever, read the works of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Co­ pernicus. Similarly, Darwin is left to the scholars. Surely, one would not want to construct a curriculum in wh ich this rich past was left to gather

I Ill I I II I Ill I 11 I I II 1(1\1 \ I I 11,

111liw, h11. '" 1t~11111 h,111111, 111 •1·d le11 ,, lltmury t anon, because it has long 11111 ,1h,1111l11111•d IIH• ·m1111 h lw ltulll , ..ind is intent on discovery. In

11Ih1 1 w111d'I, 11 h•1H 11 Is lnlt<r1•:1't!'d only in knowledge that can be de­ ilv11cl 1111111 11111th1•111t1lks and experiment. Consequently, with few ex­ II pl l1111"I, 11 d h,touragcs the focus on meaning that sti ll dominates the l111111o11iltl11s, I lktl the social sciences, the natural sciences are content with oxpl,111allon, and have forgotten that any object of knowledge is

11 ,.-1p1•d 1 110 1 o nly quantitatively o r by perception, but also historically. I ht• rolatlonship between literary tradition and h istory is the most

ll11poI l,lnl o ne. For, unless we are to take the position made popular by I 1• •111 y ford that "history is bunk," we are obliged to take a historical 111•1spcctive o n the present and the future. That is to say, what we kn~w 111 ('Onditioned by historical precedents, and our natural and social world is constituted rather than merely given. For this reason, both k1l()wlcdge and the truths of subjects themselves presuppose the ele­ I11cnts o f their formation. The danger lies in taking the position that the P''l !Scnt is absolutely determined by the past, in which case nothing over really happens; events are reworkings of their antecedents. l n­ •1 tcad, we propose that both disruption and continuity are characteris­ l lc of the nature of things. "Disruption" is a name for the proposition that things are constituted by interactions: constituted, in the first place, by intersubjective relations, but also by the relations of what hu­ mans produce in the present and the past, which appear as a part of lhe "natural" o rder. To critique the reificat ion of the social as an un­ problematic category does not dissolve everything into intersubjective relations- including our own "nature," since our relation to what is taken as nature is part of human formation. This double relation has a history that is, to a great extent, embodied in literature and philosophy, and in folk narratives that are incorporated into popular cultural forms.

While it is possible to make a strong case that reading classic texts is necessary even today because they continue to speak to our condition, we must take into account the massive shift that has occurred in the terms of the discourse: vernacular speech and popular language are now deeply embedded in the collective imagination. Thus any effort to displace this language must be perceived as an imposition from on high, an effort by p rofessional intellectuals to destroy or ignore what has happened in the last two hundred years. We do not want to argue that none of the privileged texts of Western culture should be incorpo­ rated into the curriculum. Nor are we defending anti-intellectualism, even as we explain some of its democratic impulses. But the responsi­ bil ity of intellectuals for the current state of affairs must be acknowl­ edged before the tension between tradition and modernity or post-

II, IJ II II 111 11 I Ill !'i 1 >I 111 I It

modernity can be amcllornt tid . Wl11•11 l1111 1llc, 111,,1 ~. wh11 , 111111111 ,, with the established order is their last bust hopt• tu .,,,v1• 1111 •1, ~1,1111•,, 111,1kc­ proclamations about educatio nal reform, they nw•,t 11•111,1111 su:.potl. For what Bloom means by reform is nothing less than J n t•Hort to mak<· explicit what women, minorities, and working-class students have al­ ways k~own: the precincts o f higher learning are not for them, and the educational system is meant to train a new mandarin class. Their fate is tied to technical knowledge. This is Bloom's program. In part, this be­ co_mes clear not only in Bloom's complaint that "Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are not what they used to be- the last resorts of aristocratic sentiment within the democracy" (89), b ut also in his attack on ethnic­ ity and subordinate cultures. According to Bloom,

When one h~ars men and women proclaiming that they must preserve their culture, one cannot help wondering whether this artificial notion can really take the place of the God and country for which they once would have been willing to die. The "new ethnicity" or "roots" is just another manifestation of the concern with particularity, evidence not only of the real problems of community in modern mass societies but also of the superficiality of the response to it, as well as the lack of awareness of the fundamental conflict between liberal society and culture.. . . The "ethnic" differences we see in the United States are but decaying reminiscences of old differences that caused our ancestors to kill one another. (192- 93)

In commenting on the " sample" of st udents Bloom uses to con­ struct his v iew of university life, Martha Nussbaum provides an illumi­ nating insight into Bloom's treatment of students who do not inhabit the world of elite universities, particularly subordinate groups who make up the black, ethnic, and white working class.

[Bloom's students who] are materially well off and academically successful enough to go to a small number of el ite universities and to pursue their studies there without the distraction of holding a job are equated with those having "the greatest talents" and the "more complex" natures. They are said to be the pe?ple,,who are "most likely to take advantage of a liberal education, and to be the ones who "most need education." Jt would seem that th~ disadvantaged, as Bloom imagines them, also have comparatively smaller talents, simpler natures, and fewer n_eeds. B~t Bloom never argues that they do. He simply h~s no inte~est 1n _the students whom he does not regard as the elite-an elite defined, he makes plain, by wealth and good

11 n 1 , 111 c,, 1111 KAr , 1 1 ~

11111111111 111 111111 Ii 111 t,y 1p1,,l111,,,,. 11f 1111' 111111d that have deeper \1,11111• ~

I 111 111001111 phlloNopliy .,ftc r I lcgel abandons the search for truth, 111•101 11hl f\ tlw Sl!rvant o f technical knowledge and thereby losing its 1 1,,1111 lo w isdom. But whereas Bloom wants to reconstruct the category 111 1111th thro ugh an unproblematic, quasi-essentialist, and elitist read- 11111 ol history, we believe that recovering a notion of truth grounded in ,1 c rl t lrnl reading of history that validates and reclaims democratic pub­ lic llfl' Is fundamental to the project of educational reform. Conscious- 111•~s must take itself as i ts object, recognize t hat the process of forging 1111 Identity should be tied not to representations of what shou ld be the K<>tt ls lo which students should aspire, but to w hat students themselves w.int , what they think and feel, and - most important- what they al­ rnady know. The assumption that a student is a tabula rasa upon which the teacher, armed with the wisdom of ages, places an imprint, is the basis of the widespread d istrust of education among today's students. rhe elite professoriate is recruited from that tiny minority of every gen­ eration for w hom the life of the mind represents the pinnacle of life. Such ideals are by no means shared by the preponderance of profes-

. sors, much less by their students. We are arguing for the parity of canonical text and popular text as

forms of historical knowledge. In fact, high cultural texts often origi­ nated as popular novels (the works of Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Rabe­ lais are just a few examples) . Their narratives were inevitably drawn from the everyday l ives of their readers, as well as from the lives of those who had not yet gained their own voices, either in the public sphere or in literatu re . The novelist , argues Mikhail Bakhtin, creates a narration worthy of canonization when a multipl icity of voices, analo­ gous to a polyphonic musical work, are placed in dialogic relation to one another.6 Among these, one can discover the popular, if by that term we mean those excluded from literate culture; this self-d iscovery of the voices of the popular was a basic feature of the early bourgeois epoch. In this example, we read literature as a social semiotic, as a string of signifiers that illuminate our past, that reveal ourselves, that provide us with a heritage for our own times. But the rediscovery of the popular is not the only treasure that can be scrounged from the estab­ lished canon. We may d iscover in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and in Theodore Dreiser's Chroni­ cles of American Plunder-descriptions of the human sacrifices that were made for the sake of progress at the turn of the century-the modern tragedies and comic narratives that are the dark side of

Ill 11 lltl l'I If 1111 'I I II I Ill HAI V

middle-class and native h istory or phllo~ophy, 111 11li111t , w,· 111,,y 1,1k11 literatu re as social knowledge, but the knowlcclgl' IN 11ut 111,111 ohjt•t I it is a part of the truth about ourselves.

We are sure that Bloom would find this program objectio nable b<l• cause it p reserves what should be destroyed- historicity: placing our lives in relation to our times, seeing history as less than the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, but instead, as the deconstruction of the myths of "civil ization." The democratic use of literary canons must always re­ main critical. Above all, the canon must justify itself as representing the elements of our own heritage. In the final instance, it is to be appro­ priated rather than revered-and, with this appropriation, trans­ formed . The canon, then, is to be pressed into the service of definite ends-- which frees us from the yoke of acknowledging i t as the unques­ tioned embodiment of Truth, even as it remains unread.

At first glance, Hirsch's Cultural Literacy has l ittle in common with Bloom's work . Bloom directs his attack against a number of institu­ tions, social practices, and ideologies that challenge the dominant as­ sumptions of contemporary social life. As we have mentioned, his tar­ gets include cultural relativism, higher education, popular culture, Nietzsche, the left, feminism, rock music, and the social movements of the 1960s. Hirsch's focus is narrower; he argues for a view of cultural literacy that serves both as a critique of many existing theories of edu­ cation and as a referent for a reconstructed vision of American public schooling. Whereas Bloom attacks the notion of cu lture as a referent for self- and social formation, Hirsch attempts to enlist the language of culture and the culture of literacy as bases for rethinking the American past and reconstructing the discourse of public l ife. But the differences that characterize these two positions are minor compared to the ideo­ logical and political project that they have in common.7 In the most general sense, Hirsch and Bloom represent different versions of the same ideology, one that is deeply committed to cleansing democracy of its critical and emancipatory possibilities.

At the same time, Hirsch and Bloom share a common concern for rewriting the past from the perspective of the privileged and the pow­ erful. In this view, history becomes a vehicle for endorsing a form of textual and cultural authority that legitimates an unproblematic rela­ tionship between knowledge and truth. Both disdain the democratic implications of pluralism, and each argues for a form of cu ltural unifor­ mity in which difference is consigned to the margins of both history and everyday life. From this perspective, culture, along with the au­ thority it sanctions, is not a ter rain of struggle: it is merely an artifact, a

1111 I I 1111 II I II 11111(1\q I I 111

w,11111!,111"' ' 111 H1111d.,, 1'1111l ti ·d 11lthm o1i-. ., canon of knowledge o r a 1,1111111111 l11lu1111,1tlrn1 thut 11.,~ ~I11,ply to ht: transmitted as a means for 1•11111111tlt1H 1,0<1111 rndc, ,,nd u>11trol. Learning, for both Hirsch and 1111111111, lwi llltlt• to do w ith dialogue and struggle over the meanings ,111cl pt ,It tln•s o f a historical tradition. On the contrary, learning is de­ flt1l'd prlmorl ly thro ugh a pedagogy of transmission, and knowledge is 1nd11tNI to a culture of great books or unrelated catalogues of shared lt1lormation. As we indicated earlier, their positions are both part of the 111of-tt recen t effort by the aristocratic t radit ionalists to restore knowl­ rn li,w .1s a particu lar form of social authority, pedagogy, and discipline 111 tlw classroom in order to replace democratic educational authority. I ,1ch position espouses a view of culture removed from the trappings ol power, conflict, and struggle, and in doing so, each attempts to le­ glt'lmate a view of learning and literacy that not only marginalizes the voices, languages, and cultures of subordinate groups but also de­ grades teaching and learning to the practice of implementation and mastery. Both of these discourses are profoundly antiutopian, and cor­ respond w ith a more general vision of domination and control as it has been developed during the Reagan era. Specifically, Bloom and Hirsch represent the most popular expression of the resurgent attempt on the part of right-wing intellectuals and ru ling groups to undermine the ba­ sis of democratic public life as we have known it over the last two de­ cades. In what follows, we analyze in greater detail some of these as­ sumptions through an analysis of the major themes presented in Hirsch's version of the conservative educational credo.

Hirsch has entered the debate on the nature and purpose of public school ing by way of a discourse that has gained public attention within the last ten years. In the manner of conservatives such as William Ben­ nett, Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn Jr., and Nat han Glazer, Hirsch begins with the assumption that a state of crisis exists in the United States that reflects not only the demise of public schooling but also the weakening of a wider civic and public culture. Schools in this view are frontline institutions that have reneged on their public responsibility to educate students into the dominant t raditions of Western culture.

Appropriating the radical educational position that schools are agen­ cies of social and cultural reproduct ion, conservatives such as Hirsch defend this position rather than criticize it, and make it a measure for defining both the quality of school life and that o f society at large. Im­ pl icit in this position is the notion that schools represent a preparation for and legit imation of particu lar forms of social life; they are cultural institutions that name experience, and in doing so presuppose a vision of the future. It is in these terms that Hirsch's book becomes impor-

Ill I 1111 l'I 1111 Jc '• c 11 1111 l(A( \'

tant. I or Jl lirsd1 in~bls 1'1,1t M hoob lie • ,u1,ily11•d ,,., -.11, 111 lc•,111111111111 which knowledge, not merely skills, c:onstit ti lt>-. tlit• 111ml ll11po1 t,111 t consider~lion, if public schooling is to fulfi ll ils impor,1!1vt• ,,s a trans­ mitter of ..Civic and public culture. To Hirsch's credit, he enters Lhe de­ bate regarding public schooling by arguing for a particular relatio n between tCulture and power on the one hand and literacy and learning on the otV1er. In doing so, he not only provides an impor1·ant corrective to the viEfV, that the curriculum in general and learning in particular should be! organized around the developmental organ ization of learn­ ing skills; fie also argues for a defin ition of l iteracy that embraces a particular relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge, in this case, ,s not o:ily the basis for learning; it also enables entrance into the social and economic possibilities that exist in the wider society. These isst,Jes have been analyzed critically by a number of educational traditionalists as key referents for challenging some of Hirsch's major assumptions. To pursue th is analysis we w ill examine Hirsch's view of the crisis 111 education, his reading of history and t radition, his con­ struction ()f the relationship among culture, language, and power and its contribt.ll ion to a view of literacy, and finally, the implications of Cul­ tural Liter3cy for teachers and classroom pedagogy.

Reiteratirig the arguments of Bennett, Ravitch, and Finn, Hirsch identifies the crisis in education through the general level of cultural ignorance exh ibited in recent years by American students. In this view, students lilt k the knowledge necessary to "thrive in the modern world" (xiii). Relying heavily on the declining test scores of college­ bound students, particu larly those of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the NiJtionaf Assessment of Educational Progress, as well as on an­ ecdotal evidence, Hirsch argues that there is indeed a literacy crisis in the United States. For Hirsch, the SAT is essent ially a " test of advanced vocabulary/' and as such is a "fa irly sensitive instrument for measuring levels of literacy" (4) . In these assertions, the relationship between ig­ norance ar1d learn ing, between knowledge and ideology, first becomes evident in /1irsch's book. At issue is a definition of literacy that is orga­ nized within categories that favor knowledge as a shared body of infor­ mation, and a definition of learning as the appropriation of this infor­ mation. For' Hirsch, the defin ing character o( this knowledge is that it represents the unifying facts, values, and writings of Western culture. In this insuince, the relationship between knowledge and power is le­ gitimated tWough claims to a body of information that resides beyond the sphere of historical conflict and the sh ifting terrain of ideological struggle. AiJthority and meaning come together w ithin a view of his-

II II I II It II I I I 1111 H/\1 \ I I 11

1111y tli,11 ,1pp11,11 111111111l1lt•11111llt ,111111111t h,111g1•,1l>h• in its determining 11111111 111 ,. 1111 1111' p11•~1•11I ,11,cl the• luturt•, W hc1l you sec is what you get.

i\\1111• l111po11,1111 1 I ll1 •11 It'~ vlt•w of hl~to 1y is the narrat!ve of the win- 1I1 , ,. 111" lht• dis< ow~1• of tllu t' litcs in histo ry that const itutes the fund 111 1 1llt111,1f ~11owlpcfgc tha1 defines literacy. Assured by his son_, who t.111gllt lilMh ~<'hool Latin, Hirsch recognizes that students do 111 fact I 1111w ,1111wthlng. Ignorance, for Hirsch, is not merely the ab~e_nce of 1t1lrn 1111111011. Al stake is what the students know. Literacy and 11f1teracy ,11 11 tlt•f11wd by the information students possess regarding the c~non 111 k11owlccJgc that constitutes, for Hirsch, the national -~ul~ure. Hirsch 1 l1,11,1ct,iri.1.es the crisis in literacy by the lack of fam iliarity students huw with Western culture's canon, bequeathed by h istory as a series of l,11 h - datcs of battles, authors of books, figures from Greek mythol­ "IW, and the names of past presidents of the United State~. In effect, tilt• crisis of l iteracy is defined primari ly as an epistemological and po­ llllcal problem. In the first instance, students cannot _read and_write ade­ quately un less they have the relevant background 1nf~r_mat1on, a par­ licular body of shared information that expresses a privileged cultural nurency with a high exchange value in the public sphere. In the sec­ ond instance, students who lack the requisite historical and contem­ ·porary information that constitutes the canon of Western tradition will not be able to function adequately in society. In Hirsch's terms, the new ill iteracy is embodied in those expanding ranks of stud_ents w~o are unable either to context ualize information or to communicate with each other within the parameters of a wider national culture.

Hirsch does more than rely on the logic of verification and personal anecdote to signal the new illiteracy. He also attempts t~ analyze the causes for its emergence in the last half of the twent1e_th century. Hirsch begins by arguing that schools are solely responsible for the current cultural blight plaguing contemporary youth . If students lack the requisite historical and l iterary knowledge, it is becau:e b~th schools of education and the public schools have been excessively in­ fluenced by the theoretical legacies of the early progressive mov~ment of the 1920s. Influenced by the t heories of John Dewey and the liberal ideas embodied in the 1918 Cardinal Principles of Education, public schooling is alleged to have historically shifted its. concern fro~ a knowledge-based curriculum to one that has emphasize~ the pra_ct,cal application of knowledge. The result has been, according to Hirsch, the predominance in public schools of a curriculum dominated by con­ cern for developmental psychology, student experienc~, and the _mas­ tery of skills. Within this line of reasoning, progressive educational theory and practice have undermined the intellectual content of the

I I1 llll l'llllllt •,111111 11(,\t

curriculum and fu1 thcr c:ontrlbu1t1<1 IO 1111111•, 111 p11l1l11 I!• t,11111111)' ~ar~e? by an increasing loss of authority, ('ull11111I 11 •h1tl\'h111, 1111 k oi discipline, poor academic performance, and a rcfus,1I lo I1 ,il11 •,lwle11ti. ade~uatel_Y to meet the demands of the changing industrl,d order.

H,_rsch Is not content merely with criticizing the public schools. He is also_intent on developing a programmatic d iscourse for constructing curn~ulum reform. Hirsch's message is relatively simple. He believes that Smee literacy is in a decline caused by an overemphasis on process at th~ expense of content, schools should begin to subordinate the te_achrng o_f skills to what he calls common background knowledge. For Hirsch, ~hrs common background knowledge consists of information from mainstream culture represented in standard English. Its content is drawn from what Hirsch calls the common culture, which in his terms is marked by a history and contemporary usefulness that raises it above issues of power, class, and discrimination. In Hirsch's terms, this is "ev­ erybody's culture," and the only real issue, as he sees it, is that we out­ line its contents and begin to teach it in schools. For Hirsch, the na­ !ional_la_nguage, which is at the center of his notion of literacy, is rooted rn a c1v1c religion that forms the core of stabil ity in the culture itself. "Culture" in these terms is used in a descriptive rather than an anthro­ pological and political sense; it is the medium of conservation and transmission. Its meaning is fixed in the past, and its essence is that it provides the public with a common referent for communication and exchange. It is the foundation upon which public life interacts with the pa~t,.sustains the present, and locates itself in the fut ure. Psycholin­ ~u1st1c r~search and an unchallenged relationship among industrializa­ t ion,_~at1o~alism, and historical progress provide the major referents mobrlrzed ,_n the name of cultural literacy. The logic underlying Hirsch's argument Is that cultural literacy is the precondition for industrial growth, and that with industrial growth comes the standardization of ~an~uag~; _culture, and learning. The equation is somewhat baffling in rts_s1mpl1_c1ty, and H_irsch act~all~ devotes whole chapters to developing thrs particular version of historical determinism. The outcome of his Hegel ian rendering of history and literacy is a view of Western culture that is both egalitarian and homogeneous.8 Hirsch dismisses the no­ tion tha~ ~ulture has any determinate relation to the practices of power and polit1~s, or that it i~ largely defined as a part of an ongoing struggle t? n~me history, experience, knowledge, and the meaning of everyday lrfe m one's own terms. Culture for Hirsch is a network of information shro~ded in innocence and goodwill. This is in part reflected in his reading of the relationship between culture and what he describes as nation building:

II II I II"' 111 1111 ltAt \ I I II

N,,II1111 l1111ld1•1 11 1 ,1p11l1 ltw111 1t. of Mhol,nly folk materials, old 1111K", 111,.,, 11111 d 111111 111, ,11111 lll'llorknl ltgends all apparently

q1h1l11I ,11111 Inc ,111 I ► 111 111 It 1,11f1y :.elected and reinterpreted by 11,1..111 11111,d'I to i l l'Hl n ,1 nrlturc upon which the life of the lhlllon c:rn ,ost. (ID)

I lwllI Is a to talitarian unity in Hirsch's view of culture that is at odds with tlw concept of democratic pluralism and political difference. In l,tt t, where difference is introduced by Hirsch, as in reference to mul­ tlc 1rlluralism or bilingualism, it appears to vacillate between the cate- 11rnfos o f a disrupting discourse and a threat to the vitality and strength o f Iha Western cult ural tradition . Hirsch's defense of a unified version o f Western tradition ideologically marks his defin ition of cultural liter­ ,u y as more t han a simplistic call for a common language and canon of •,hared information. Hirsch's argument is that to be culturally literate is 1110 possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world," and that mastering the standard literate language will make us "masters of communication, thereby enabling us to give and receive complex information orally and in writing over time" (3) . This argu­ ment is not merely a prescription for a particular form of literacy and schooling. It is part of a hegemonic discourse that is symptomatic of the crisis in history currently facing this nation, and is a threat to de­ mocracy itself.

We w ill analyze some of the major arguments made by Hirsch in de­ fense of h is notion of cu ltural literacy. In doing so we will not restrict our analysis to the defining ideas that Hirsch develops, but w ill also ana­ lyze the significant gaps in Hirsch's view of _history, literacy, culture, and schooling. We hope to show that Hirsch's argument is more than a popular and politically innocent treatise on educational reform, but rather serves at best as a veiled apology for a highly dogmatic and re­ actionary view of literacy and schooling. At worst, Hirsch's model of cultural literacy threatens the very democracy he claims to be preserv- ing. ·

For Hirsch, the starting point for the crisis in literacy and education is the decline of student achievement as measured by the SAT and sim­ ilar tests. Hirsch and other conservatives presume that t_he test scores accurately measure academic proficiency, and that progress in educa­ tional reform can be accurately inferred from an upturn in SAT scores. In recent times this wisdom has been highly disputed. Not only is the val idity of the SAT and other national measurement schemes being questioned despite the alleged objectivity of such tests, but it is also being strongly argued that the reliance on test scores as a measure of

r ti 1111 111111111 111 11111(, I

school success contains fi1 llM•ll "' I I • I I to improving the quality of s~ho~I 11/ ,' o ':KYI"'' I hlffhl\ ii, 1111111•111,I ical learning.9 c. <ll'< provldf11H 1111 1111~1-. 1111 1 ill

We believe that Hirsch 's reliance on h ture of the p roblems p bl" h sue sco res to ,ll h1fy✓c the ''-' theoretically impoverishued'::~ poo~l:ic~~rrent~y f~ce in t~is co_u_ntry Is nores the wider com I . Y v,s,on ess. Th,s pos1t1on lg­ fluence the way scho~l:x of social and

expense of others. For (:;;:~~~ct~~~d political forces that deeply in-

to ~~nef'.t s~me students at the

ways that tracking, the hidden c~rric~l~~s,:,i; ~s s_llf n~ regdarding the nence as a valid basis for knowl , en,a o_ stu ent expe­ on racial, sexist, and class intedge, a~? s~h'?ol practices predicated Nothing in Hirsch's position speae:::ts h ,scnminate against students. of high school students in inne - ·t o t e 50 to 80 percent dropout rate cities l ike Chicago, schools wi;hc~~:~hools, or to the fact that i~ major enrollment mana e to reta·n a 50 percent black and Hispanic

by their senior y!ar.10 The~e ~~~r!~ ~~r~~-n~of the entering freshmen that cannot be accounted for or e g ,g t a number of problems so-called aptitude tests. Hirsch's r:~~ ~nderstood through an~lysis of

~::k~~r~~ ::\!he

aecffi;:; ~echnical _rationalit~ i~t~i~ ~e;:it~~~r~:t~~d'~~o;~:

State-mandated t~a~!'-~ular t::tt

women, within the last decade.,, reading and writing, have be:ne ;;ores, especially in the _areas of form movement tied t . p a -~uch broader educational re-

o mstrumental1z1ng teaching d I . around a variety of accountabi lity schemes As Li~~ Dearl~1ng Hammond reports th I h . a ar mg-' e resu ts ave had very little to do w ·th . reform and a great deal to d . h . 1 genuine despair : o wit teacher d1sempowerment and

Viewing teachers as semiskilled I . . produ~tion of educatio n, policym~r~~a~da:orkers in the mass

~ii~i~~a~~te education, to improve it by "teach f sou~ht to change

~ave se~n a prolife~:;i~ri~/~f~~~~a~ever the y sc emes that go by acronyms l ike MBO

(management by objectives) PBBS ( rf · budgeting sy t ) CB ' pe ormance-based and MCT ( _s ems ' E (competency-based education)

minimum competency testing) I · · · teachers that in response to pol' . h · · · w~ earned from practices and outcomes they sp1~~eJ lte at tr:rescnbe teaching subi·e t h ' ss ,me on untested

c s · · · t ey use less writing in th I . gear assignments to the format of st J cd~ssrJoms in order to resort to lectures rather than classr an ar_ ize _test~; they cover the prescribed behavioral b?On:1 d1sc~ss1on m order to

o JectIves without getting " off

1111 111 II I 11 11 11 1At V I i '

11t, 1,11, ~". 11t, ~ 1111 p11, 11111,·d 1111111 11.,l11g l<•,ll hlt1g rtu1lerlab llt,11 ,111· 111111111 I''' , 1ll11•d ll• , 1l11111k ll~h, even when they think lh1 1, 11 11i.1tn1h1I" ,111• 1111\1•111111 lo niticl the needs of some of their 1,d11cln11t -.; ,111cl ll11•y 11 111<unstrained fro m following up on c•xp11•.,s(•d stl1dt•111 lnwrcsts that lie o u ts ide the bounds of 111,rnclntod curricula .... And 45 percent of the teachers in this •Hudy told us that the single thing that would make them leave l l',\C'hing was the increased prescriptiveness of teaching content ,\Ml methods - in short, the continuing deprofessionalization of w aching.12

I lirsch appears unaware that the politics of verification and empi ri ­ c-Ism that he suppo rts frame his own agenda for reform in a way that is ,11 odds with an ethical and substantive vision o f what schools might be w ith respect to their potential for empowering both students and teachers as active and critical citizens . Hirsch's rel iance on narrow models of psycholinguistic research forces him to use absolute catego­ ries, that is, categories that appear to transcend historical, cultural, and political contingencies. By ignoring a wide range of sociological, cul­ tural, and historical research on schooling, Hirsch wrongly names the nature of the crisis he attempts to address. He completely ignores those theories of schooling that in recent years have illustrated how

13 schools function as agencies of social and cultural reproduction. He completely ignores existing critical research that points to how work­ ing-class and minority children are discriminated against through vari­ ous approaches to reading;14 he exhibits no theoretical awareness of

15 how schools frequently silence or discriminate against students; and he completely ignores the research that points out ways in which the state and other social, economic, and political interests bear down on and shape the daily practices of school organization and classroom life.16 Consequently, Hirsch's analysis and prescriptions are both sim­ plistic and incorrect. The crisis in education is not about the back­ ground information that young people allegedly lack, or the inability of students to communicate in o rder to adapt more readily to the dictates of the dominant culture. Rather, it is a crisis framed in the intersections of c itizenship, historical consciousness, and inequality, one that speaks to a breakdown at t he heart of democratic public life.

The limitations of Hirsch's view of the crisis are evident not only in the research he selects to define the problem, but also in the factors he points to as causes of the crisis in literacy and schooling. Among the chief h istorical villains in Hirsch's script are the progressive principles embodied in the work of John Dewey. Hirsch holds Dewey respo nsib le for promoting a formalism in which t he issues of experience and pro-

It, I 111 I CJI It,, ,II 11111

Cl"•'> bt•< 0 11w ,1 ~ul>-. l1h1 t,• 101 l<H 11-.11,g 1111 -.11111111 ~1111\\h .i , 111 lltl' 1 school curriculum. I lirsch arguPs that Dl'W<'Y h llw 111,,j111 1'1,•1111•111 ,d architect o f a contenl-nculral curricu lum (as if i.u, h ,1 111 I11g c-wI l'X

isted). Dewey's crime in this view is that he has influc nc t•d l.1tt·1 g(•ncr­ ations of educators to take critical thinking seriously, as opposed 10 learning the·virtues o f having students accumulate information for the purpose of shoring up the status quo.

Hirsch misinterprets Dewey's work. Even the most casual reading of Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum and The Schoof and Society reveals a blatant re fusal to accept any division between content and process or between knowledge and thinking. Rather than support this bifurcation, Dewey argued that the attempt to impart information with­ out the benefit of self-reflection and context generally resulted in methods of teaching in which knowledge was cut off from its organic connection to the student's experiences and the wider society. Dewey was not against facts, as Hirsch argues; he was against the mere collec­ tion of facts both uninformed by a working hypothesis and unenlight­ ened by critical reflection. He was against the categorization of knowl­ edge into steri le and so-called finished forms. We are certainly not suggesting that Hirsch's misreading of Dewey represents an act of in­ tellectual dishonesty; more probably, since Dewey's views are so much at odds with Hirsch's theory of learning and schooling, it was easier for him to misread Dewey than to engage his ideas direct ly on specific is­ sues. For example, Hirsch's claim that memorization is a noble method o f learning, his refusal to situate schooling in broader historical, social, and political contexts, and his belief that public culture is historically defined through the progressive accumulation of info rmation repre­ sent major ideas that Dewey spent a lifetime refuting as educationally unsound and politically reactionary. But Hirsch refuses to argue with Dewey on these issues; instead, he cavalierly attributes to Dewey a series of one-dimensional ideas that Dewey never advocated. This is not merely a distortion of Dewey's work; it also represents a view of history and causality t hat is, as we explain below, deeply flawed. More­ over, Hirsch reproduces in this view of educational history and practice a slightly different version of Bloom's profoundly antidemocratic tirade.

Underlying Hirsch's view of the major causes of the p roblems with American education is a notion of history that is reductionist and the­ oretically flawed. It is reductionist because i t assumes that ideas are t·he determining factor in shaping history, somehow unfolding in linear fashion from one generation to the next. There is no sense of how these ideas are worked out and mediated through the ideological and

!IHI 11111 tllllllltl\1

111111 tl,,I, 1111d1111111 1111111 11 t11111 ~, 111 111how hb 101y b sh,\pcd through 1111 , l11tt1Hh•H 111111, •111 111 , 11111111111111 ,111011, lt•chnology, langu_a~c con­ flli 1, -.1111Hgh•-. 1>..iw,•1•11 clillt•rt•11t '>Oc.icll groups, and the sh1ftrn~ _pa- 1.11,wl"'" ol -.1,,tl• pow1•1. 11,,.,ch\ history lacks any concrete poltt1_cal ,1111 1.,111 1,,1rdurl'lll !>, I1~ t:ausal relations are construed through a stnng

111 1« 11•,,~, ,111(1 l't is presented without the benefit of a substantially ar- 11111,cl hb torical context. While ideas are important i~ shaping history, 1I 11 ,y <.urnot be considered so powerful as to alter history beyond the di •n-.lty of i ts material and social contexts. Ideas are not_so powerful 11!,,1 th<.iy exist , as Hirsch believes, in an autonomous real, independent 111 human activity. 17

I lirsch practices historical inquiry not as a form of soci_al memory lt1tt as a form of repression. It is history stripped of the d1scours~ of power, injustice, and conflict. For instance, the struggle over_ curricu­ lum in the United States emerged in the first half of the twentieth cen­ lury amid an intense war of ideological positi_ons, each atte~pting to , tamp its public philosophy and view of lea_rning on the ~umculum of 1hc public schools. As Herbert Kliebard points out, cumculu~ repre­ •wnted a terrain of struggle among different groups over questions re­ garding the purpose of schooling, how c~ildren _learn, whose kn~w~; .pdge was to be legitimated, and what socia l relations would prevail.. 1 he contend ing groups included social efficiency a_dvocates whose ~n­ orities were based on the interests of corporate id eology, humantsts who were advocates of the revered traditions of Western cultural heri­ tage, developmentalists who wanted to reform ~he curric~lum a~o~nd the scientific study of child development, and fi nally, social meltonsts who wanted to shape the curriculum in the interests of social reform. Kliebard not only provides a complex and dense history of the struggle for control of the curriculum in the public schools, he also argues that the most important force in shaping curriculum i~ the _u_nited States came not from the progressives but from the social effrc1ency move­ ment. Given the history of public schooling since the rise of the Cold War and the launching of Sputnik, there can be little doubt that the ef­ ficiency and accountability models for curriculum ~a_ve ca rried the d~y.

History for Hirsch is not a terrain of struggle;19 1t Is a museum of in­

formation that merely legitimates a particular view o f itself as a set of sacred goods designed to be received rather than interro~at_ed by stu­ dents. We have stressed Hirsch's view of history, because It influences every category he relies upon to dev_elop his ~aj~r arguments. _w_e be­ gan our criticism of his work by argu111g that his discourse on cr~s1~ and cultural restoration missed the point. We want to return to this issue and argue that the real crisis in American schooling can be better un-

·Ill I I I I II l'1 II II Ic '• 1 11 I 111 HN 'I'

derstood through an analysis o'f the rise o f scll•t1th1111 ,111«111, 11111111,1111 rationality as a major ideological force in the 19201,; tlu• 1t1111w,l11g l rn pingement of state policy on the shaping of school cur ti< 111,1 ; 1111 anti­ communism of the 1950s; the increasing influence of industrial psy­ chology in defining the purpose of schooling; the rise of individualism and consumerism through the growth of the cultu re industry, in which the logic of standard ization, repetit ion, and rationalization defines and shapes the culture of consumption; the gendered nature of teaching as manifested in the educational labor force and in the construction of school admin istration and curriculum; the racism, sexism, and cfass discrimination that have been reinforced through increasing use of tracking and testing; and the failure of teachers to gain sufficient con­ trol over the conditions of their labor. While this is not the place to dis­ cuss these issues, they need to be included in any analysis of the prob­ lems that public schools are now facing. Moreover, these issues point to a much broader crisis in the schools and the wider society than Hirsch is willing to recognize. 20 It is a crisis that has given rise to cyni­ cism about the promise of democracy, to a vast and unequal distribu­ tion of ideological and material resources both in the schools and in the wider society, and to the repression of those aspects of our history that carry the voices and social memories of groups who have been marginalized in the struggle for democratic life.

Central to Hirsch's concept of literacy is an understanding of the re­ lationship between culture and literacy that warrants close theoretical scrutiny. For Hirsch, culture, which is the central structuring category in h is approach to literacy and learning, appears as a mythic category t hat exists beyond the realm of politics and struggle. It is systematically reduced to a canon of information that constitutes not only a fund of background knowledge but also a vehicle for social and economic mobility:

Literate culture has become the common currency for social and economic exchange in our democracy, and the only avail~ble t ic~et to full citizenship. Getting one's membership card 1s not tied to class or race. Membership is automatic if one learns that background information and the linguistic conventions that are needed to read, write, and speak effectively. (22)

There is a false egalitarianism defining Hirsch's view of cu lture, one that suggests that while it is possible to distinguish between main­ stream and what he calls ethnic culture, the concept of culture itself has nothing to do with struggle and power. Culture is seen as the to-

II ft I 1111 II I II I1111(1\1 \ I I ,., I

t,,llly 111 1111 I 1111-1 11,11-11 I'' '" lh 1 11 ol ,1 glvt>11 ri.,tlon, and merely "pre- ""'"'' Ir.., II 1111 ,1 11 to p,11 tl1 lp,1h• In Its language and conventions.

111, .., h rl'fwm~ to ,11 ~11owh•dgc how deeply the struggle for moral and 11111 1.,1 11•gul.itlo11 Im,< rlbos it self in the language of culture. He makes 1111 ,1ltt1111pt to intorrogatc culture as the shared and lived principles of 11 11• characteristic of different groups and classes as these emerge within unequal relations of power and struggle. Not unlike Bloom's po- 11l tlon1 Hirsch's view of culture expresses a single, durable history and vision, one at odds with the notion of difference, and maintains an omi­ nous ideological silence - an ideological amnesia of sorts-regard ing the validity and importance of the experiences of women, b lacks, and other groups excluded from the narrative of mainstream history and r ulture. Thus there emerges no sense of culture as a field of struggle, or as a domain of competing interests in which dominant and subordi­ nate groups live out and make sense of their given circumstances and conditions of life. This is an essentialist reading of culture. It deeply underestimates the central feature of cultural relations in the twentieth century. That is, by failing to acknowledge the multilayered relations between cu lture and power, Hirsch ignores how the ideological and structural weight of different cultural practices operates as a form of cultural politics. In this case, he not only ignores how domination works in the cultural sphere, he also refuses to acknowledge the dia­ lectic of cultural struggle between different groups over competing or­ ders of meaning, experience, and history.

The fail ing of Hirsch's view of culture is most evident in his analysis of public schools. He provides little, if any, understanding of the forms of struggle that take place in schools over different forms of knowledge and social relations. This is best exemplified in the research on cultu re and schooling that has emerged within the last twenty years both in the United States and abroad. Theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, and others have investigated the relationship between power and cu lture, arguing that the culture transmitted by the school is related to the various cultures that make up the wider society, in that it confirms and sustains the culture of dominant groups while marginalizing and silencing the cultures of sub­ o rdinate groups of students.21 This is evident in the way in which dif­ ferent forms of l inguistic and cultural competency, whether they are manifested in a specific way of talking, dressing, acting, thinking, or presenting oneself, are accorded a privileged status in schools. For ex­ ample, Ray Rist, Jean Anyan, and Hugh Mehan have demonstrated that white middle-class linguist ic forms, modes of style, and values repre­ sent honored forms of cultural capital and are accorded a greater ex-

1,11 I 1111 11111 I flt Ill 11111 I

change rate In the d 1nill:. o l pow1•1 th,11 dl'lll11 111d h Hlll11111!1• 111,, meaning of success in public sd1ools.n S1ud1•111~ w t11, 1, •111 11111•111 , 111 tural forms that rely o n restricted linguistic cod(•~, wn1l-lt1H , 1,,.,:-. 01 op positional modes of dress (long hair, earrings, bizarre pull1•111/, of cloth ing), who downplay the ethos of individualism (and who may actwilly share their work and t ime), who espouse a form of solidarity, or who reject forms of academic knowledge that embody versions of history, social science, and success that are at odds with their own cultural ex­ periences and values, find themselves at a decided academic, social, and ideological disadvantage in most schools.

A more critical understanding of the relationship between culture and schooling would start with a definition of culture as a set of activ­ ities by which different groups produce collective memories, knowl­ edge, social relations, and values w ithin historically constituted rela­ tions of power. Culture is about the productio n and legitimation of particular ways of li fe, and schools often transmit a culture that is spe­ cific to class, gender, and race. By depoliticizing the issue of culture, Hirsch is unable to develop a view of either literacy o r pedagogy that acknowledges the complex workings of power as they are produced and mediated through the cultural processes that structure school life. Thus Hirsch ends up with a view of l iteracy cleansed of its own com­ plicity in furthering cultural practices and ideologies that reproduce the worst dimensions of schooling.

Given Hirsch's view of cu lture, it is not surprising that he espouses a clothesline-of-information approach to l iteracy that ignores its func­ tion as a technology of social control, as a feature of cultural organiza­ tion that reproduces rather than critically engages the dominant social order. When the power of literacy is framed around a unifying logic consistent with the imperatives of the dominant culture, those groups outside the dominant tradition are often silenced because their voices and experiences are not recognized as legitimate. Hirsch's view of lit­ eracy decontextualizes learners, both from the culture and mode of literacy that give their voices meaning, and from that which is legiti­ mated as knowledge in the name of the dominant version of literacy. Literacy for Hirsch is treated as a universal discourse and process that exists outside "the social and political relations, ideological practices, and symbolic meaning structures in which it is embedded." 23 Not only is the notion of multiple literacies (the concept of cultural difference) ignored in this formulation, but those who are considered "illiterate" bear the burden of forms of moral and social regulation that often deny their histories, voices, and sufferings. To argue for a recognition of the dialectical quality of literacy-that is, its power either to limit or en-

1111 I 111 III t II I I I I l(At ' I I 11

11,111, ,, 1t11 1111111 , ,,p,11 llh " ,,,. w,·11 '"' 1111' mul1lph• forms of expression it 1 ,~,... 11 ,1 1 d11,,ply pnllll• 111 1 ..•,11t•. It t111•,ms recognizing that there are dllft•11111I vult 11<;

1 l,1111111,1111•.,, histo ries, and ways of viewing and expe~1-

••11t 11111ilw world , ,111d lh,111hc recognition and ~f!irmation ofth~se d1f­ '"' 111111•11 Is ,\ necessary and important precond1t1on for extending the pn'l•ilhllllltis of democratic life. June Jord~n has captured ~he impor­ tiuu p of th is issue in her comments regarding the problems in a demo­ t 1,111< state:

If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to lturt·le, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common ~~er_ican n~mes, all the undeniable and representative and part1c1patmg voices of everybody here. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language conform to the truth of our many selves and we would make our la~guage lead us into the

24 equality of power that a democratic state must represent.

To acknowledge different forms of literacy is not to suggest that they should all be given equal weight. On the contrary, it_ is to argue that their differences are to be weighed against the capacity they have for enabling people to locate themselves in their own historie_s while si­ multaneously establishing the conditions for them to fu~ct,on as pa~t of a wider democratic culture. This represents a form of l iteracy that 1s not merely epistemological but also deeply political and emine~tly pedagogical. It is political because literacy r~presents a set of practices that can provide the conditions through which peopl_e can be empo:v• ered or disempowered. l t is pedagogical because literacy al~~ys in­

volves social relations in which learning takes place; power leg1t1mates a particular view of the world, and privilege, a specific rendering of knowledge.25

This view of cu lture, knowledge, and literacy is far removed from the language and ideology of Hirsch and Bloom. The refusa_l to b~ l it­ erate in their terms means that one has refused to appropriate either the canon of the Great Books or the canon of information that charac­ terizes the tradition of Western culture. In this view, refusal is not re­ sistance o r criticism; it is judged as ignorance or failure. This view of culture and l iteracy is also implicated in the theories of pedago?y put forth by Bloom and Hirsch. Both subscribe to _a pedagogy_ t~at is pr_o­ foundly reactionary and can be summed up tn the terms t ransmis­ sion" and "imposition." Both authors refuse to analyze how p~dago_gy, as a deliberate and critical attempt to influence the ways in which knowledge and identities are produced within and among particu lar

'•l 11 1111 l'I II 1111 ', I ti I II I K,\1'

sets of social relations, might address tlw rt11011~1111• 111111 111 ~,111,,1 imagination in the service of human freedom. 1lw I al ◄ •l{111 l1•-. nl 11w,111 i ng that students bring to the classroom and that provld1• llwrn with ,I basis for producing and interpreting knowledge are simply denied by Bloom and Hirsch as viabl e categories of learning. Pedagogy, for both Bloom and Hirsch, is an afterthought. It is something one does to im• plement a preconstituted body of knowledge. The notion that peda­ gogy represents a method or technique for transmitting information, as well as an essential dynamic in the productio n and exchange of knowledge, necessitates that educators attend to the categories of meaning that students bring to the classroom as well as to the funda­ mental question of why they should want to learn anything in the first place. Th is is an especially important consideration for those students in the public schools who know that the truth of their lives and expe­ riences is omitted from the curriculum. A pedagogy that takes their lives seriously would have to begin with a quest ion that June Jordan has suggested such students constantly pose to teachers through their absences and overt forms of school resistance: "lf you don't know and don't care about who I am then why should I give a damn about what you say you do know about."26 To legitimate or address a question o f this sort would constitute for Bloom and Hirsch not merely bad teach­ ing, but a dangerous social practice.

Read against the recent legacy of a critical educational tradition, the p erspectives advanced by both Bloom and Hirsch reflect those of the critic who fears the indeterminacy of the future and who, in an attempt to escape the messy web of everyday life, purges the past of its cont ra­ dictions, its paradoxes, and ultimately, of its injustices. Hirsch and Bloom sidestep the disquieting, disrupting, interrupting problems of sexism, racism, class exploitation, and other social issues that bear down so heavily on the present. This is a form of textual authority and discourse produced by pedagogues who are afraid of the future, who are strangled by the past, and who refuse to address the complexity, terror, and possibilities of the present. Most important, it is a public philosophy informed by a crippl ing ethnocentri sm27 and a contempt for the language and social relations fundamental to the ideals of a democratic society. It is, in the end, a desperate move by thinkers who would rather cli ng to a tradition forged by myth than work toward a collective future built on democratic possibilities . There is no sense in Bloom and Hirsch of a not io n of textual authority that recognizes the need to engage in a living dialogue with diverse traditions that because of their partiality and h istorical limits need to be reread and recreated as part of an ongoing struggle for democratic public life. In the end,

II It .. 111 Ill 111 I III Kl\c \ I ' ti

1111111111 ,md I Ill~• It t 11111{ 111 u 1111111111111 loxtu.,I ,Hl1horlty that neither pro­ d111 , ,,. t, Ith 111 t 111,.,11, 11111 p111vldl':-. llw foundation for pedagogy in with ti 1111• c111ullllnt1'I o! l11,11nl11g become possib le for the vast majority , ,t cl lvrn ~t• pooplt•1, who llw In this society. What we are left with is the phlln-.oplly nnd pedagogy of hegemonic intellectuals cloaked in the 11111111 11• o f academic enlightenment and literacy.

Notes

f . l·o r an example of this position, see William Bennett, " 'To Reclaim a Legacy': Text orRoporl on Humanities in Higher Education," Chronide of Higher Education, Novem- 111,, 28, 1964, '16---21; Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds l<nowt (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); for an excellent critique of th is position, see ltohert Scho les, "Aiming a Canon at the Curriculum," Salmagundi, 72 (Fall 1986), 101- 17.

Publication information for the two works that are the primary subjects of this chapter IN as follows: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon &

'ic'huster, 1987), and E. D. Hirsch , Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton M ifflin, 1987).

2. This issue is taken up in Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, Schooling and Work In the Democratic State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).

3. Given Bloom's ti rade on popular cult ure and rock music, it is both somewhat sur­ prising and ironic that when a reporter asked him if he had anticipated t he popular suc­ cess of The Closing of the American Mind, he responded wi th, "Sometimes I can't be­ fleve it. , . . It's like being declared Cary Grant, or a rock star. All this energy passing through you." Maybe Bloom has missed the contradiction here, but it appears that his newfound energy undermines both his own critique of the affective value of popular cul­ ture, and h is own need to interrogate the underlying d ichotomy he constructs between pleasure and learning. He may be surprised to find that the terrain of pleasure may be more complex and contradictory than he first imagined. See Henry A. Giroux and Roger I. Simon, " Popular Culture and Critical Pedagogy," Cultural Studies 2 (1988), 294-320. Bloom's comment is taken from James Atlas, "Chicago's Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Pro­ fessor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals," New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1988, 25.

4. See Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Hannah Arendt, ed., 11/uminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 253-64.

s. In Martha Nussbaum, "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books, No­ vember 5, 1987,·22.

6. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Em­ erson and M ichael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

7. Robert Scho les provides an i l luminating commentary on the conservat ive agenda underlying the d ifferences and commonalities that characterize the Bloom and Hirsch books:

Hirsch wants to save us through information. He thinks that knowing about th ings is more important than knowing things. Bloom, on the other hand, lhinks that the only thing that can save us is a return to really knowing and experiencing the great books, especially the great works of political and social philosophy that follow in the t rain of Plato's Republic. Hirsch concerns himself w ith what every American student should know, whereas Bloom is concerned only about a tiny el ite.

'ti I I 1111 1'111 II II !i 111 1111 It

Together, llwy sd llw t011H11vutlv11,lf1Pt1tl11 1111 A1111•1h ,11,, 1h11 ,111111

Hirsch will make sure l'hat everyone knows wl111t '"", 1,1-•h 11, 11111 respects them, while Bloom will sec to It that iln (11111, 1,111 111 • d1'11t11•cl hy actually knowing these classics. In this way, the masses wlll lu, sufficiently educated to respect the superior knowledge o f tht•li l>t'tlc rs, who have studied in a few major universities. Both Hirsch and Bloom emphasize certain kinds of traditional learning, but it is important to recognize that the attitude they take toward this learning is very different. for Bloom nothing less than a prolonged, serious engagement with the great books themselves can save the souls of our students. For Hirsch, just knowing the names of the great books and authors w ill suffice. Both Hirsch and Bloom share, however, a nostalgia for a not very closely examined past in which things were better. (Robert Scho les, "Three Views of Education: Nostalgia, History, and Voodoo," College English, 50 (1988], 323-24)

8. The simplicity, ignorance, and political interests that often inform this particular view of Western culture are analyzed and deconst ructed in James Clifford, The Predica­ ment of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ·t988) .

9. For a criticism of this form of testing, see A llan Nairn and Associates, The Reign of ETS: The Corporation That Makes Up Minds (Washington, D.C. : Ralph Nader, 1980); David Owen, None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985); Peter Schrag, "What the Test Scores Really M ean," The Nation, October 4, 1986, 311-14; Peter Schrag, "Who Wants Good Teachers?" The Nation, Octo­ ber 11, 1986, 332-45.

10. For both a statistical and a theoretical analysis of these problems, see National Coalition of Advocates for Students, Barriers to Excellence: Our Children at Risk (Boston: Author, 1985).

11. M ichael W. Apple, Teachers and Text: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

12. Linda Darling-Hammond, "Valuing Teachers: The Making of a Profession," Teach­ ers College Record, 87 (1985), 210.

13. For a review of this literature, see Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Edu­ cation (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Press, 1985).

14. See, for example, Patrick Shannon, "The Use of Commercial Reading Materials in American Elementary Schools," Reading Research Quarterly, 19 (1983), 68-85; Patrick Shannon, "Reading Instruction and Social Class," Language Arts, 62 (1985), 604--11; Ken­ neth S. Goodman, "Basal Readers: A Call for Action," Language Arts, 63 (1986), 358--63.

15. See, for example, Michelle Fine, "Silencing in Public Schools," Language Arts, 64 (1987), 157-74; Henry A. Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (Minneapolis; University of M innesota Press, 1988).

16. Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for Ali: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York : Basic Books, 1985); Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education under Siege (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Press, 1985).

17. Hirsch's view of h istory represents what Harvey). Graff calls a radically idealist conception of h istorical causation, in w hich one speaks " in historical claims w ithout studying or interpreting any range of historical evidence or [presumes] the universality

fl It 111111 t 11 I 111 l(AI \ 1 l ,,,

tt111I 111,w,, "' Ith ,1, wllht111t 1t111111tl11H l11lt1 tl.111111111d ih11lt 111 tw,I o, ultcrn.itlvo historical , 1,1111 ••• "' , "'•- •·•111• 111, , ll111 v1 y J 1,i.111 1 "A 1{11vl11w of the Closlny of the American A//111/ l/11w IIIH/11•1 I i/111 ,11/,111 /1,111 l ,1//m/ Uomocmcy and Impoverished the Souls of To­ ,/ 11 , •.irn/1111 />i," ,~rn /11ty II (Nov11111hor/Dcccmbor, 1907), 101. 1

111 t lt•1 hn1t M. Klloh111tl , //11, .~rruyglc for the American Curriculum 1893-'/958 (New \111~ l(1111tl11clH" & K(igan 1',1ul, 191.16).

l'I t lliNl h'b view o f history is strikingly similar to that expressed by W illiam J. Bennett 11 , Iii• 11 111 Rm lnlm a Legacy." In this view, as Harvey J. Kaye has pointed out, history is not , 111tvnyml .,~ a "sense of the conflicts between social and polit ical groups over ideas, val­ '""• 1111d social relations. Nor does it posit the necessity of examining the distance be­ two"n 'Ideal' and 'experience' in Western Civilization and world h istory." In Harvey J. ~ ,1yo, " I ho Use and Abuse of the Past: The New Right and the Crisis of History," in Ralph Mlllh,111d, Leo Panitch, and John Saville, eds., Socialist Register 1987 (London: Merlin l'111s~, 1987), 354.

:.w. Hirsch argues for a notion of cultural literacy that suffers both from a misplaced 1111th In its social and economic possibil ities and a refusal to take seriously how a peda­ lll'ISY might be constructed that is consistent with the aims of this particular form of lit- 111 ,1c-y. In the first instance, Hirsch argues that literacy is an essential preconditi~n for 1,llmlnating just about every social and economic evil that plagues contemporary indus­ t, lal societies. In this view, l iteracy becomes an independent variable that operates as ,mt of a simple cause and effect relationship to produce particular outcomes. The issue 1

hore is not simply that Hirsch claims more for literacy than it can actually do as an ideo­ logical and social p ractice; more important, Hirsch presents an argument for literacy that hoth ignores and mystifies the role that w ider cultural, historical, and social forces play 111 defining both the different forms of literacy and in supporting particular political and (•Conomic inequities. Hirsch's view of literacy is one that is si lent about the wider prob­ lems and inequities that plague American society, problems that are rooted in configu­ rations of power and structural relations that call into question not simply the dominant forms of literacy but the political, economic, and social fabric of the society itself. This issue is discussed in Harvey Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (New York: Academic Press, 1979); see also Colin Lankshear with Moira Lawler, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution (New York: Falmer Press, 1987). But Hirsch does more than mystify the nature and effects of l iteracy, he also completely ignores the issue of what makes students want to learn, to be interested, or to listen to pedagogues such as himself. As we point out in the latter section of this essay, pedagogy for Hirsch is an unproblematic and uncritical construct, a technique to be employed after one has decided on the content to be taught. Given the wide gap between what Hirsch expects from his view of literacy and the simplistic and reactionary view of pedagogy he employs, it is not surprising that he ends up with what Scholes has called "voodoo edu­ cation." (See Scholes, "Three Views of Education," 327.)

21. This literature is extensively reviewed in Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Educa­ tion .

22. Ray Rist, "On Understanding t he Process of Schooling: The Contribution of La­ beling Theory," in J. Karabel and A. H. Halsey, eds., Power and Ideology (New York: Ox­ ford University Press, ·1977); Jean Anyon, "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work," in Henry A. Giroux, Anthony Penna, and William Pinar, eds., Curriculum and In­ struction (Berkeley: Mccutchan, 1981); Hugh Mehan, Learning Lessons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).

23. Kathleen Rockhill, "Gender, Language and the Politics of Literacy," British Journal ofSociology of Education, 8 (1987), 158.