EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
375
with elementary and secondary education. In order to reform schools in
the United States, we're constantly looking to some simple solution, like
adding a month to the school year. But look at the great difference in
outcomes in European countries. For example, only five
to
six percent
of American students still in school at age eighteen (after twenty-five
percent have dropped out) are able to achieve at what is considered the
highest writing level, being the ability to write a good letter or essay.
Only five to six percent can read and comprehend material like
The New
York Times
or handle real twelfth-grade math problems. In contrast, in
Germany, thirty percent of graduating students meet much higher stan–
dards than the ones I've just described. They're not throwing away the
kids
at the bottom either: their bottom kids do a lot better than ours, so
it's not a matter of their educating only an elite, whereas we're con–
cerned with educating everybody. When you get such a difference, it
seems to me that the intelligent thing to do would be to look at what
they're doing that's different from what we're doing. For one thing,
they all agree on curriculum content. They do not have every teacher, or
every school, or every district doing something different; they make col–
lective decisions. They change these from time
to
time, but they deal
with what's worthwhile, with issues of values - as a province, or as a
country, even when the common curriculum isn't always one hundred
percent of the curriculum. The failure here to face this issue or even to
discuss it is problematic.
I recently looked at a paper that was drawn up by a distinguished
group of English teachers from across the country. They were to write a
description of what standards should be met by outstanding teachers.
Their document spoke to children's interests, took their differences into
account. But this document made no reference to the desire or the abil–
ity to read anything worthwhile, or to any sort of common content. It
was all process and capturing children's interest. I also think that the dis–
missal of E. D. Hirsch's book,
Cllitural Literacy,
as a right-wing docu–
ment denied the possiblity that some things may be worthwhile reading
in common. In a society, every writer assumes that you've got a certain
amount of background knowledge and a certain amount of common
understanding. If you don't have that, then what you read doesn't make
much sense to you; it would make about as much sense as reading a
British newspaper would to me. I could read the words, but I wouldn't
understand much if I didn't know British politics or sports or all sorts of
other things. In other words, the idea that we need to spend some time
developing a common background was thrown out as some sort of
right-wing conspiracy to get all youngsters to learn about dead white
males and European culture. I think that was sort of the beginning of
