Theology Today - Vol 44, No.4 - January 1988 - CRITIC'S CORNER

484 - The Unreal Worlds of Bloom and Hirsch

The Unreal Worlds of Bloom and Hirsch

IT is virtually impossible to make meaningful generalizations about the condition of American education and culture. That, of course, doesn't stop some eminent authorities from trying, and when it. comes to the failure of our schools and ignorance about our traditions, everyone is an authority. Things are clearly in a bad way when college students can't identify with any heroes (Bloom) and when someone (Hirsch) has to tell us that we should know about Benedict Arnold but not necessarily about eggs benedict.

Bloom and Hirsch have become household names among educators and analysts, and their two big books have been near the top of best seller lists ever since publication. Both authors deplore the sad state of' education and culture, and, while they differ on some matters, their recommendations for bettering our situation are much the same, namely, large doses of classical literature and philosophy (Bloom) and a check-list of five thousand names and terms that would indicate the difference between cultural literacy and illiteracy (Hirsch). Both uncritically assume that teaching is telling and learning is listening.

Neither critic finds much good to say about today's youth culture, and students are regarded not as persons in their own right but as aimless drifters who need someone in authority to tell them what they should know and do. Bloom scorns the suggestion that out of the student protest movements of the '60s and '70s there emerged as positive contributions "greater openness," "less rigidity," and "freedom from authority." He describes the student movements in terms like "farce," "travesty," and "disaster."

If we can judge by the multiple references in his index, Bloom's heroes (and villains) are: Aristotle (20), Freud (15), Hobbes (11), Locke (11), Nietzsche (25), Plato and Socrates (44), Rousseau (17), with six to ten references for Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and Weber. As Richard Rorty, philosopher at the University of Virginia, notes sarcastically, "Everyone knows that the real people that matter are dead Greeks and Germans." Bloom, says Rorty, "doesn't

Hugh T. Kerr is Senior Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY and Professor of Theology, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary. He is here commenting on the two best sellers, The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987).

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really believe that America exists as an intellectual culture" (TIME, Aug. 17, 1987, p. 57).

Hirsch is less interested in reinvigorating American culture by transfusions from past golden ages. He senses the historical ambiguity involved when voices from the past are invoked to speak for today. "Time has shown," he writes, "that there is much truth in the durable educational theories of both Rousseau and Plato. But ... no thinkers, however profound, can foresee the future implications of their ideas.... The great test of social ideas is the crucible of history ... [which] shows us that neither the content-neutral curriculum of Rousseau and Dewey nor the narrowly specified curriculum of Plato is adequate to the needs of a modern nation."

To be culturally literate, Hirsch explains, "is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world." That would immediately appeal to any street-wise group of inner-city kids who could extend Hirsch's basic list of culturally identifiable terms with some graphic and earthy examples of their own. If "children from poor and illiterate homes" suffer from culture amnesia about what happened in Hirsch's basic time-frames (1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-65, 1914-18, 1939-45), they probably know something he doesn't and never will know.

It is easy to criticize the critics and thus overlook the positive contributions these controversial volumes make for general educational and cultural discussion. When they are highly praised by William J. Bennett, Secretary of Education, and Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, we can be sure that virtually every superintendent, principal, dean, and president, plus innumerable teachers, will be reading and evaluating not only the books but the critical reviews. As Walter Ong has often noted in his interpretation of orality cultures, as long as people-even enemies-talk with and to each other, there is hope for peace. It is when conversation stops that we should be fearful.

In the meantime, there are signs of hope if we only look for them. As Craig Dykstra's editorial in this issue notes, there are some creative teachers here and there, and perhaps every school and college has at least one outstanding person who knows how to expand students' vision. In a recent "60 Minutes" television program, viewers were emotionally drawn into a marvelous college course on Vietnam taught by Walter Capps, professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Among other things, Capps arranged for veterans to speak to the class of a thousand students (sixteen hundred had signed up for the course) and included a field trip to the Washington Vietnam Memorial. In several televised episodes, both men and women students as well as the professor himself were obviously moved to tears at what they heard and saw.

Another sign of hope: it might be claimed that electronic technology

486 - The Unreal Worlds of Bloom and Hirsch

has come to our rescue just in time. Young people today are very sophisticated about operating data-base and retrieval systems. All this advanced equipment is readily available in libraries, schools, and campus centers everywhere. With the overload of information in every field, it may well be more important in our day to know how to look up something than to scrutinize the classics or tick off cultural literacy items in a quiz. No doubt, Bloom and Hirsch would scoff at such a suggestion. Wouldn't they say that this computer technology is precisely the kind of pragmatic seduction that short-circuits "real" education? But who knows? The road to tomorrow in education and cultural literacy, when further evidence is at hand, may lie through today rather than returning to yesterday.

Two additional signs of hope may be mentioned. One is the quite astonishing academic achievement, at all levels, by Asian Americans. In this year's entering classes, for example, Brown University has admitted 9% Asian Americans, Harvard nearly 14%, M.I.T. 20%, California Institute of Technology 21%, the University of California 25%. In engineering, at the University of Washington 20% are of Asian descent and at Berkeley 40%. And it isn't just science, technology, and engineering where Asians excel. The Julliard School of Music has enrolled 25% Asian students. As Diane Ravitch of Columbia University's Teachers College points out, "if you arrive with high aspirations and self-discipline, schools are a path to upward mobility." (These items are quoted from a follow-up "Education" essay in TIME, Aug. 31, 1987, pp. 42-51.)

Graduate and professional schools at the present time provide still another area for hopeful expectations. Surely our lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists (and let us also add ministers, biblical scholars, and theologians) are immeasurably better educated than their predecessors of fifty years ago. There may be too much specialization and requirements may get strung out, but American graduate and professional education, once in thrall to European universities, is now widely regarded as second to none.

III

The questioner always has the advantage, whether it be a Senate investigating committee, Ben Matlock and Perry Mason in a TV court, Mortimer Adler presiding at one of his Aspen round-table seminars, or Bill Buckley popping his eyes on "The Firing Line." In these and other such adversary discussions, the ones being interviewed and interrogated seldom emerge as acute or intelligent respondents.

The so-called Socratic method of teaching, long touted as the best way of eliciting a student's intellectual curiosity, depends on the derivation of the Latin educere as meaning the "drawing out" of what is already there. So the teacher, in the Socratic image, plays the role of mid-wife, bringing forth inborn ideas and truths. But there is another similar Latin word with a very different connotation. Educare suggests a

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process of nourishing and developing. As the current vocabulary might put it, education is a "supportive" and "acceptive" process of mutual participation with student and teacher learning together.

Education in the Socratic mode as "drawing forth" or "educing" is very much in the traditional formula of teaching as telling and learning as listening. Socrates was surely a great teacher, but his disciples must have squirmed, sweated, and agonized as the tutor shot repeated questions at them with the primary intent of showing up their ignorance.

Is there possibly another teacher-student, master-disciple paradigm we are forgetting in our contemporary discussions about education and cultural literacy? How about the Jewish rabbi-teacher tradition of aphorisms, wise sayings, and witticisms? (To an over-achiever: "You want to be the richest person in the cemetery?") How about Jesus and his disciples? Peter and Thomas and Judas could be problem students with a severe learning deficiency, and Jesus could ask some jolting questions, but the accepting way that Jesus interacted with his contemporaries should teach us something about teaching and about people as persons. And what about recent feminist studies that highlight Jesus' easy acceptance of women as persons of worth?

This latter query leads to a final polite but earnest invitation to Bloom and his publisher to join the human race. From the preface of his book to the last chapter, Bloom speaks of "man" and "mankind" and other kinds of unrelieved masculinist language. For a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago and a distinguished press such as Simon and Schuster to indulge unapologetically in such persistent sexist language is a more persuasive illustration than the book itself that even the best of us can unwittingly participate in "the closing of the American mind."