To School for Unity

Commentary

If you don’t have a core curriculum in the schools and colleges, if there isn’t a limited set of books, ideas, documents, events, and personages that all students study and retain, you will not have a well-functioning, high-trust, unified society.

That’s the working premise of conservative educators. Or, rather, I should say education conservatives, because one can be a political liberal and still endorse a curriculum that maintains a common tradition. An example is E.D. Hirsch, the famed author of “Cultural Literacy” who started the Core Knowledge Foundation after his book became a long-running best-seller. He is also a liberal Democrat, at 96 years old still fervent in his mission, and clear in his thinking. (I served on the board of the foundation for several years.)

Hirsch’s position is that general knowledge of history, politics, science, religion, literature, and the arts—think of it as the knowledge rewarded on “Jeopardy!”—is a necessary factor in upward mobility. It comes in handy on standardized tests whose passages presume such knowledge, and it helps adults mingle in professional habitats. Upper-income kids get it at home and in elite private and upscale suburban public schools with lots of AP courses. Lower-income kids don’t get it at all unless their schools teach it; sadly, most don’t. Hence Hirsch’s core knowledge method, which plants in kids’ heads Greek myth, world geography, World War II, Shakespeare, and all the other bits of information and facts and stories that an educated American possesses. The teaching of such things to disadvantaged kids levels the playing field, at least on this matter of background knowledge.

A core curriculum also unites the kids who study it. Rich and poor, boys and girls, black people and white people, Christians and non-Christians, Democrats and Republicans … they share a heritage and together recognize a reference to Achilles’s heel in an op-ed, recall where the country Finland lies when they hear it mentioned on the news, and identify the Biblical line “set aside childish things” when they hear President Barack Obama cite it in his 2008 inaugural address.

People far apart on various current controversies agree on what from the past is important to and formative of the present. They’ve been taught to think this way. The knowledge serves as a kind of social glue, a bond with friends, neighbors, and fellow Americans everywhere. This is especially the case in a country whose people move around so much and have shaky ancestral ties to the land.

The problem, of course, is that a core tradition runs against the multiculturalist outlook of the education sphere. To most practicing educators, a syllabus in English, social studies, and other “soft” subjects is to be measured by its representation of demographic identities. It is a historical fact that nearly all the people in control of U.S. politics and culture up to the mid-20th century were white men, which makes courses that teach U.S. history in a traditional way a little dubious. A college class on 19th-century American literature has only one female writer who stands at the same rank as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Twain: Emily Dickinson. What is one to do?

Progressive educators have a ready answer. They drop the traditional orientation and break up the lineage. They include female figures, and writers and personages of color, too, and make their respective classes diverse and particular.

The results are what you might expect—some courses are stimulating and deep, others predictable and shallow—but quality is not the issue. Rather, the crucial point is commonality, specifically, its loss. By definition, diversity disallows an authoritative canon, even a diverse one! If we came up with an American literature course with, say, 12 authors covered, half of them female and half non-white, it might stand as a reformed canon, the literature course for the 21st century. Everyone would read the same works—E.D. Hirsch would be happy.

But how soon would an objection be made: What about this author, who represents an immigrant experience not found on the syllabus, or that author, who has an identity not covered by the existing authors, for instance, an Asian American woman living in the South?

I’m not trying to be cute. It’s a genuine objection, given the logic of diversity that prompted the opening of the traditional canon in the first place. A diversity of representations means a diversity of humanities courses. The common experience is over. We have given attention to the multiple identities of America, but we have lost a shared cultural memory, the intellectual glue that held us together. It’s a tragic situation whereby one benefit comes about only through the sacrifice of another.

I hold with the greater value of a core, a common inheritance, however narrow it appears. Unless that core is restored and passed on, we should expect more social strife to come.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.