BOOKS
475
out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to
learn how to read." But Purcell-Gates doesn't need so distant an asser–
tion of the deficiency of illiteracy. Donny's mother acknowledges it: "I
don't want what happened to us to happen to my son," she implores.
"It's hard not knowing how to read! I know!"
Such scenes explain why teachers have so little credibility in the pub–
lic sphere. There is no doubt that the contributors to this volume are
earnest, conscientious educators, but when a principle of cu ltu ral dif–
ference levels a ll values and trumps intellectual judgment, when teach–
ers themselves bear the resentments that learning strives to overcome,
the enterprise stumbles . Controversies like the Ebonics affair erupt, and
the public demands an accounting. What this vo lume shows is that
instead of listening to the criticism, the education establishment has
hardened its position, set its virtue against the racism and apathy of U.S.
society, and so entangled academic subjects with identity politics that
one rues the fate of culture in the nation's schoo ls.
Mark Bauerlein
What's This Guy Grinning About?
SMILING THROUGH THE CULTURAL CATASTROPHE: TOWARO THE REVIVAL
OF HIGHER EOUCATION. By Jeffrey Hart. Yale University Press. $26.95.
JEFFREY HART, SENIOR EDITOR of
National Review
and Emeritus Pro–
fessor at Dartmouth University, has long been a player in what the
media loves to call the "culture wars." He has never been shy about
detailing the ways that the study of literature has been hijacked, but his
latest book, a survey of the great works of Western literature, begins by
simply conceding that the pickle we're in is now a fact, "evident to any–
one w ith eyes to see and ears to hear."
Indeed, one need on ly thumb through a handful of representative col–
lege catalogs-or, for that matter, the an nual program issue of the Mod–
ern Language Association-to get the general drift. What worries Hart
much more, however, is that the books he discusses at length, and with
an engaged intelligence, are no longer "part of the intellectual equipment
even of professors in the liberal arts today, much less of their students."
This point was driven home to me during a recent English department
