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Making Education Measure Up
The Sunday Oregonian FORUM February 26, 1989
By Sharon Schuman
New 'Cultural Literacy' courses take first steps in reforming American education, but more is needed to ensure democracy
 American
education is at a crossroads. Either we find a better way
to educate the democracy, or we admit that we have abandoned
that project in favor of educating only the experts who run
the democracy. This crisis is reflected in daily statistics
like these: Only 12 percent of American adults know that astrology
is not a science (National Science Foundation, 1989). Of the
17 countries studied in 1988 by the International Association
for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, the United
States has slipped to third from the bottom in terms of "science
achievement," just edging out Hong Kong and the Philippines.
I give you these particular statistics, rather than the usual anemic SAT scores, to emphasize that as U.S. economic and military might fade, we are increasingly concerned about our long-term ability to hold some prominent place in the world. This concern, and not some nostalgic interest in the "life of the mind," is what turned E.D. Hirsch's "Cultural Literacy" into a 1987 best seller.
That book, subtitled "What Every American Needs To Know," focuses on learning not for its own sake but as it functions to enhance or undermine America's ability to develop citizens who will maintain, or regain, its place in the world. In it Hirsch promises a sequel, a dictionary that will explain the list of terms presented in the first book, so that teachers across the country can begin to create for their students a common background for learning.
Hirsch has made good on his promise, and more: In the March 2 issue of the New York Review of Books, we learn in his article, "How to Save the Schools," that he has started a foundation with a network of some 800 schools in 50 states.
These schools use, grade by grade, a series of lists "provisionally recommended" by the foundation for grades one through 12. The purpose of the lists is to help students throughout the country develop "common goals of knowledge." Although participating schools are encouraged to offer recommendations for revising the lists, and have done so for the 12th-grade list, they "have expressed virtually no dissent regarding the items that now appear on our cumulative sixth-grade list."
This unanimity for the earlier grades encourages Hirsch to hope that "a consensus can be reached on a core of knowledge for the first six grades of schooling." As the children from these schools begin to excel on the standardized tests, according to Hirsch, his "grass-roots" movement will spread to neighboring schools and eventually throughout the nation.
The only current impediment to success, he says, is the lack of "classroom materials and lesson plans designed to unify and teach the agreed-upon sequences, a crippling handicap." We can therefore expect to see in the near future a massive wave of publications designed to meet this need. Meanwhile, we have the recently published Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988), which is organized into sections, are the yearly lists, to facilitate its use by classroom teachers.
If anyone fails to see that Hirsch's program, originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Exxon Education Foundation, and encouraged by administrators from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Academy of Education, involves a revolution in American education ~- away from the progressive programs of John Dewey, the laissez-faire experiments of the '60s and the skills orientation of the present - it is time to notice what is going on and to think about where all this might be leading.
In the next few months, parent meetings at our neighborhood public schools are sure to be debating the merits of Hirsch's plan, although to Hirsch the direction is clear: His program will "save the schools" of America. If this is true, it behooves us at least to look a little closer at the nature of this salvation.
What, then, does Hirsch have in mind?
In his article, he publishes a portion of three categories from the cumulative sixth-grade list: American history to 1865, (beginning with 1492, 1776, 1861-1865, abolition, Alamo, all men are created equal . . .); literature (beginning with Aesop's Fables, Aladdin's Lamp, Alice in Wonderland, Hans Christian Andersen, Maya Angelou ...); and life sciences (including Darwin, deciduous, dinosaur and ecology).
Working from these lists, a sixth-grade teacher can presumably help children learn the "background information" without which further learning is impossible, For example, although we can't look up "1492" in the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, we can look up Christopher Columbus (thus demonstrating already our mastery of crucial background information). What we will then find is this entry:
"An Italian explorer who discovered America in 1492. He had sailed across the ATLANTIC OCEAN from SPAIN, under the patronage of the king and queen, FERDINAND and ISABELLA, hoping to find a westward route to INDIA. His ships were the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Columbus made four voyages to the NEW WORLD, visiting the BAHAMAS, CUBA, Hispaniola, PUERTO RICO, JAMAICA, TRINIDAD, VENEZUELA, and the coast of CENTRAL AMERICA."
Presumably, the sixth-grader reads this entry, which holds, as Hirsch promised in his first book, "the associations that each item tends to call forth in the minds of literate persons," associations that are by Hirsch's own admission "typically elementary and incomplete," "vague," and "superficial." What exactly are we settling for here and then calling "literacy"? If America was discovered in 1492, what were all those people already living here doing? If the history of America begins in 1492, where do we put the Missipian civilization, its city of 20,000, now said to rival (or eclipse) Aztec culture? Where do we put the Aztecs? Why is this whole section that begins with "1492" called "American history" rather than "History of the United States," since it seems odd to pre-empt the word "American" from the Canadians, the Mexicans and the residents of Central and South America?
In short, this entry more than fulfills Hirsch's promise of superficiality. It encourages the ethnic myopia that has contributed so systematically to our bombastic self-image, and it educates a new generation of sixth-graders to be just as closed-minded as many of their elders are. Is this what we mean by trying to make our children culturally literate?
Of course, an enterprising sixth-grade teacher could deconstruct this entry, and turn it into a lesson on historical perspective: how we choose to create a version of history by selecting some facts and words to emphasize over others.
Somehow I doubt that this is what Hirsch has in mind. His dictionary seems devoted largely to perpetuating what most of us already believe, for better or worse.
The single exception to this procedure is Hirsch's treatment of science, in which he seeks not just to perpetuate what we know (since what we know is almost obsolete), but to introduce the terms and concepts that are rapidly changing and becoming inaccessible to the average educated American.
If, for example, we leave behind the sixth-grade list and turn to the section of the dictionary devoted to "Physical Sciences and Mathematics," we find entries like 'endothermic," "meson," and "wave-particle duality." For 'endothermic," the entry reads: "a descriptive term for a chemical reaction in which heat is absorbed." (Compare "exothermic.")
Although this definition is perhaps incomplete, it seems to reflect a radically different purpose from the rest of the dictionary. If we go back to Hirsch's original book, we find in the appendix an explanation of that different purpose:
"Because there is little broad knowledge of science even among educated people, the kind of criteria used to compile our lists for the humanities and social sciences - for example, would a literate person be familiar with this term? - simply can't be used for the natural sciences. . . . Our criterion for choosing a science entry has been that the candidate must be truly essential to a broad grasp of a major science." Thus the scientific entries in the dictionary are prescriptive - what we should know - rather than descriptive - what we already know.
This discrepancy between the treatments accorded to science and the humanities should make us wonder. Why is it that we can afford to be vague and superficial about the humanities but need a "broad grasp" of the basics when it comes to science? Why can we be satisfied with "Columbus discovered America in 1492," but we need to know that a meson is "an elementary particle in the atomic nucleus."
I am not advocating that we should deny science the affirmative action it seems to be accorded here. But if the entire dictionary was conceived along the lines of the scientific sections, it would be a more valuable teaching aid.
Right now it is only in the scientific sections that we see some admission that the status quo, as reflected in the statistics above, is not good enough. Since we tend to see science and technology as our nation's areas of greatest erosion and therefore greatest potential for turning things around, we expect Hirsch's program to be especially strong in the sciences, and it is. But doesn't the rest of the dictionary encourage us to be complacent about the literacy we have achieved as adults and self-congratulatory about the systematic ease with which we can now "save our schools," so that they can succeed in producing citizens just like us?
If we are willing to settle for this, then we must be willing to .ignore the fact that the world of science is not the only world that is changing faster than we can learn the words to describe it. If we are 14th out of 17 in scientific knowledge, where do we belong on the standardized test of ethics? If we need to decide how much to spend on research in monoclonal antibodies, we need to know more than what that term, unfortunately left out of the dictionary, means. We need to know how to weigh the need for cancer and AIDS research against housing, weapons, Social Security and a hundred other considerations that are multiplying even as the people of the world multiply and their capacity for hurting each other takes new and frightening forms.
As our questions and relationships become more complex, where, exactly, are we supposed to get the increased deliberative capacity to uncover answers that will lead us toward, rather than away from, civilization? From "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy"?
Answering this question forces us to make some significant choices about education in the United States. Do we presume that most people neither want to, nor have the capacity to, confront these choices? If this is so, then we can concentrate our greatest educational resources on those few whose scientific aptitudes can help us regain world power and coordinate this elite with another group who seem able to take on the problems that power might unleash. Of course, we may have trouble identifying this second elite, since deliberative ability is not so easy to quantify in some ethical aptitude test.
Suppose, though, we could select an expert corps of decision-makers to lead us back to prestige as a world power. Are we willing to take the risk that once we turn things over to them they might somehow derail us from the track of civilization, instead of safeguarding our progress?
Given the magnitude of what is at stake, it seems safer to go on attempting to provide some kind of democratic education for all.
But what should that education include?
Here is where Hirsch's dictionary and foundation may turn out to be far more useful than they intend to be. As word begins to spread about the network of 800 schools, and communities across the nation begirt to send away to 2012-B Morion Drive, Charlottesville, Va. 22901 for more information about the lists and the instructional materials to come, teachers and parents will find themselves taking part in a long-overdue debate.
We will ask each other this: What should constitute the shared information and principles 0, U.S. citizens? How do we prepare our children to become adults capable of choosing well, when the crisis we can't even foresee is upon us?
As we attempt to answer these questions, they will generate others that are more specific: Can we achieve some consensus on a core list of 10 works of literature and biography, to be read by all sixth-graders? Can we agree about what historical events, religious questions or scientific problems all sixth- graders should explore, so that they will be ready for what comes next? Or are we too pluralistic and wary of controversy to even consider such a prospect?
Hirsch's present success seems to indicate that we are ready to reconsider and perhaps abandon our obsession with individual preference and education as smorgasboard. Choosing what to try next, though, may turn out to be the most difficult decision we make for a long time. It is a decision we cannot afford to delegate to experts, even though we may feel ill-prepared to make it. It is a decision that will be worked out in the libraries and gymnasiums of public schools across the nation, by parents and teachers just trying to do their duty as citizens.
"The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" may not offer the answers we need, but it will be a catalyst in this experiment we call democracy. If we are successful, perhaps we will make a new place for ourselves in the world, one that hinges not on technological superiority, but on some superior recognition of what it means to be human.
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