TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87capaid.3

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 13KB | 231 lines

                                                                                August 17, 1987

EDUCATION

Are Student Heads Full of Emptiness?


Two scholarly authors have beach-time best sellers that blast
U.S. education


Allan What? and E.D. Who?  Educators are bemused, booksellers
astonished. No wonder. Two professor-authors. Allan Bloom of
the University of Chicago and E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the University
of Virginia, are leaders on the best-seller lists, even though
their tomes would not seem the stuff of mass browsing in the
summer sun.

Yet there they are. Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind,
with the daunting subtitle How Higher Education Has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, has
250,000 copies in print and tops the New York Times nonfiction
list, where it has been for 15 straight weeks. It is also No.
1 in Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. Hirsch's Cultural
Literacy ranks No. 1 in Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston.
Hirsch's Cultural Literacy ranks No. 3 after ten weeks on the
Times list, with 155,000 books issued.

Bloom, 56, a genial philosopher, professes himself to be
"absolutely astounded" at the impact of a work that he thought
might have 5,000 or 6,000 buyers. "75% of whom I know."  But
somehow Bloom's gloomy tract (Simon & Schuster; $18.95) and
Hirsch's book as well (Houghton Mifflin; $16.95) seem to be full
of things a lot of people care about. Bloom's principal
message:  American universities, capitulating to 1960s
activists, abandoned sound liberal arts teaching for trendy,
"relevant" studies in which all ideas have equal value. Bloom
deplores this surrender to "cultural relativism," which he
considers a flawed derivative of Nietzsche's nihilism. Under
its influence, higher education has failed to keep the flame of
true learning or guide today's students, many of whom appear to
Bloom to be sex-ridden money-grubbers marching to the beat of
rock music ("commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy,"
says the professor). The only sure way back, he claims, is to
re-establish the disciplines of the liberal arts, with the
classic philosophers and European savants at the heart of the
curriculum.

Hirsch, 59, a professor of English, aims his blast at academe
from a slightly different sniper's perch. He charges that
schools have given up teaching the unifying facts, values and
writings of Western culture, creating a generation of cultural
illiterates. As evidence he cites a 1985 study by the National
Assessment of Educational Progress. Among other lacunae, it
found that two-thirds of the high schoolers surveyed did not
know when the Civil War was fought, and half could not identify
Winston Churchill. "One's literacy depends upon the breadth of
one's acquaintance with a national culture," Hirsch writes.

Hirsch's villain is Educational Philosopher John Dewey, who, in
his landmark 1915 treatise Schools of Tomorrow, espoused the
learning of skills rather than information. The long-range
result, says Hirsch, is that children can now decode words but
lack the understanding to put what they read into broad,
insightful context. The Hirsch antidote:  heavy doses of
Western cultural lore, as represented by a list of nearly 5,000
entries in an appendix labeled "What Literate Americans Know,"
ranging from A ("act of God") to Z ("Zeitgeist"), and including
"1066" and "White Christmas (song)."  Knowing at least a
commercial idea when it sees one, namely the untrivial sales
impact of the list, Houghton Mifflin promises more where it came
from, i.e., a dictionary of cultural terms and perhaps an
electronic game to test cultural literacy.

Ultimately, Hirsch would like to see a Western thought-centered
curriculum prescribed for the nation's schools. His stated
concern is that "all kids should have access to cultural
literacy, not just an elite few."  He is particularly worried
about disadvantaged students, who, he says, are not likely to
get such training at home and, without careful teaching in
school, may miss the opportunity of being absorbed into
society's mainstream.

While praise in academe has hardly been unanimous for Bloom and
Hirsch, the two have got raves from some powerful and diverse
educators. Secretary of Education William Bennett, a staunch
conservative who has beaten the Western drum while beating up
on the colleges for the same perceived derelictions as Bloom
denounced, calls the Chicago philosopher's work a "brilliant
book, a phenomenon" that "points out where higher education has
gone wrong and what we need to fix it."  Bennett says, "Too many
schools ignore the great minds and instead try to teach kids how
to make a living."

Bennett has some markedly ecumenical company, including
Carnegie Foundation President Ernest Boyer, a liberal. Boyer's
1986 book College:  The Undergraduate Experience in America
takes higher education to task for disjointed careerist study
programs, confusion over goals and lack of a liberal arts core
curriculum. Albert Shanker, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, declares himself a Hirsch fan.
"Education holds our society together only as long as what is
taught has value and is important," he says. "You can't teach
reading with comic books and rock-star magazines and expect kids
to be educated."

Bill Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction,
concurs. "We need to have that cultural understanding," he
says. "There should be agreement--whether in Portland, Ore., or
Portland, Me.--that you're going to learn something about
freedom and justice." And John Silber, iconoclastic president
of Boston University, declares that "Bloom and Hirsch are on the
best-seller list because people around the country are just
starving for this."

The authors think they know who their hungry readers are.
Hirsch claims approval both from elders for his calling up of
"what education used to be," and from those in their 20s who
favor the book because they believe they have been shortchanged.
Bloom reports that interest in his book "seems to come from
parents who have lived for so long with the formulas and
bromides from the '60s about how you educate your children. It
somehow played upon a parental concern that hadn't found a
voice."  Bloom also feels that he, like Hirsch, has roused the
concern of disaffected students. One editor of a major college
newspaper recently told him. "We all felt we had been robbed of
our educations, but we didn't know how to articulate it."

The books' publishers, while dutifully crediting the quality of
their authors' insights, acknowledge some plain marketing luck.
"It's a cyclical thing," says Robert Asahina, Bloom's editor.
"It started [in 1955] with Why Johnny Can't Read, and we just
hit it right on the nose with this book, totally accidentally,
of course."

The reaction to the books in much of academe has been chilly.
Harvard President Derek Bok slapped at Bloom and other
education gadflies in a recent speech, observing, "When times
are bad, the public will look for scapegoats, and education is
often an attractive candidate."  Others, like University of
Virginia Philosopher Richard Rorty, respect Bloom's learning but
take issue with what they see as his intellectual bias. "Bloom
says that anyone who doesn't see the world as Plato sees it just
doesn't know what's going on. It's very fundamentalist in that
these people called the 'philosophers' take the place of the
'saved,' and if you haven't had the experience of reading Plato,
then it's as if you weren't 'born again.'"  Warming to the task,
Rorty adds sardonically, "Everyone knows that the real people
that matter are dead Greeks and Germans."  Bloom, he concludes,
"doesn't really believe that America exists as an intellectual
culture. He writes as if we were completely at the mercy of
bright Europeans occasionally washing up on these shores and
telling us where the ideas came from."

Mortimer Adler, educational philosopher and publisher of the
Great Books series, pronounces the new volumes "silly."  Says
he:  "Schools are bad. We didn't need the Bloom book to find
that out. Everything Bloom complains about is what [the late
Chicago University President Robert] Hutchins and I talked about
in the '30s."  As for Hirsch's work, he says, "that book is a
best seller because people play it the way they play Trivial
Pursuit."  Wayne Booth, a Chicago English professor who attended
a meeting of 60 high school and college English teachers,
reports they are concerned. "What scares all of them is that
both books will be taken by the wrong handle, that the list at
the back of Hirsch's book will be taken as something to be
taught directly. It's an absurd reduction of the problem."

Among the more even voices in the debate is that of Saul
Cooperman, New Jersey's commissioner of education. He agrees
that standards of learning must be set--provided the standards
are broad enough to embrace the entire world. "How can we get
into the mind of Islamic fundamentalism," he asks, "unless we
know what Islam is?  We had better learn about people like
Saladin, that he wasn't just some jerk riding a camel. With the
world getting smaller, we can't just sit here saying 'My country
right or wrong.'"  Hirsch denies any jingoism or other
implications of conservatism in his educational agenda. "This
is not a conservative issue," he says. "This is a liberal
idea."  Bloom too denies any conservative bias, or Western bias
for that matter. "Actually the book goes right up the center,"
he claims, "touching on the concerns of all rational Americans."

Along with quarrels on ideology, perhaps the most intense
objections to Bloom's and Hirsch's doctrines come from educators
who feel that many of the ideas are out of touch with
countrywide classroom realities. Says Ralph Cusick, principal
of Chicago's 3,900-pupil, predominantly Hispanic Schurz High
School:  "What people lose sight of is that we've got to educate
everybody--even the 35 IQs--and we've got them in school:  "What
people lose sight of is that we've got to educate
everybody--even the 35 IQs--and we've got them in school." Last
year Schurz also had more than 20 student suicide attempts,
with only one counselor to help every 400 youngsters--not
atypical of big- city schools around the country. The trouble
begins before school does, says Cusick, Children come into
kindergarten "not knowing colors or letters. You walk into
houses, the radio is blasting, the TV is blasting, and babies
are crawling on the floor. I really think a lot of the answers
are in early childhood."  He finished his list of ills with the
failure of communities and the nation to train and reward good
teachers properly. "We don't want to pay or respect them," he
says. Hence, "we're not attracting the teachers we should."

The best sellers are criticized as well for urging a set of
educational values that fail to take into account the pluralism
and vast inequities in the U.S. educational system. Bloom, for
example, harshly criticizes American universities for allegedly
lowering standards to admit black students. And he objects to
specialized courses like black studies, which he calls a "form
of segregation." Such opinions have led many black educators to
take him to task. Kenneth Tollett, professor of higher education
at Howard University, accuses Bloom of "monumental
insensitivity" toward blacks. They face great cultural barriers
on white campuses, Tollett points out. "Special efforts are
needed to help students overcome this culture shock."

The number of fault-finding responses have satisfied the authors
as much--well, almost--as the number of readers. Bloom notes
that his purpose was never to offer a full range of solutions
but rather to raise questions and, perhaps too, the level of
debate. That, both of them have done, along with some hackles.
And while some educators concede, however grudgingly, that the
bottom line on both books is their extraordinary ability to
engage the nation in a renewed dialogue on education, others say
the very popularity of the books is the most powerful argument
against their theses. For where but in a well-educated country
would so many people turn in the heat of summer from the usual
pop reading fare of sex, scandal and psychiatry to immerse
themselves in two tomes about education?

--By Ezra Bowen.  Reported by Lawrence Malkin/Boston and
Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago