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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sunday sermons preached wit!) no expectation that anything can be
done about the conditions deplored . Allan Bloom's
The Closing
of
the
American Mind
is the most notable current example of this sort of
ritualized complaint. But in several cases, specific practical alter–
natives have been proposed and have provoked wide discussion. I
am thinking particularly of former Secretary of Education William
Bennett's 1984 pamphlet, "To Reclaim a Legacy," a report commis–
sioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities (of which
Bennett was then chairman), and E. D . Hirsch's 1987 book,
Cultural
Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.
Bennett proposes to in–
stitute a common content at the college level by means of a Great
Books curriculum. Hirsch would produce a similar result in the ele–
mentary grades by condensing into lists the information that "literate
Americans know."
Americans are rightly alarmed at the state of the curriculum,
and the Bennett and Hirsch proposals offer the sort of apparently
commonsense solutions they want to hear. In the long run, however,
such proposals are likely to have more value in drawing public atten–
tion to educational issues and stirring up debate than in providing
workable strategies. Bennett's version of the Great Books idea hardly
differs from the one which fizzled when proposed by Robert May–
nard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago in
the 1930s. There is little reason to think it will be any more effective
this time around.
Hirsch is concerned chiefly with the elementary levels of
schooling, but his ideas have been influential in the college debate as
well. Hirsch would shift the emphasis from great books and formal
skills to the information content students tend to lack. However, he
too fails to see that education is a social practice, and that reducing it
,
to an abstract set of contents leads to the same arid result as reducing
it to isolated skills or texts. Hirsch's intentions are good, and his
assumption is probably correct that those who pass for literate take
for granted a shared body of information. The problem is that learn-
ing to use such information is too context-dependent a process to be
successfully gained from lists and encyclopedia entries, especially by
students who are often disaffected from intellectual culture . It is
therefore dohbtful that cultural literacy can be packaged, for study-
ing it in this form would be so boring as to induce a lifelong hatred of
learning.
Bennett and Hirsch have too much faith in lists, whether of
books or of facts, and not enough interest in the contexts which give
