"Despite intense efforts driven by the No Child Left Behind Act, the language abilities of our 17-year-olds have remained stuck at the steeply declined levels of the 1970s...."
Why despite? Might it not also be, "because" of those efforts?
Why doesn't Prof. Hirsch take up that counter-argument in the least bit in his essay? What aspect of his "core knowledge" enables him to make that rhetorical move?

It is fairly common in arguments such as this--a version of which seems to be playing out in those town halls he mentions: things aren't working, bring out the socialist ghosts (here, progressive child-centered education that has no part in NCLB) and some anecdotes to deflect attention from what is really in place in schools, in order then to argue: let's do even more of what hasn't worked. What's really new, here, Hirsch?

Ditto to srmeehan. Lynn Cheney also has her ideas of what is the "correct knowledge" children should learn. I'm with Ralph Waldo Emerson in promoting pluralism. Variety is not only the spice of life but essential for survival of democracy. Like evolutionary diversity, I'm placing my bets with pluralism. "Strong Liberalism" by Jason Scorza is a good read.

I wonder if the "background knowledge" the author has in mind is the kinds that would have allowed voters to realize what a sham the GOP has been since Reagan ran for the White House, or see through the bright lights of Camelot to the seedy side of JFK and his family. I can only imagine how thrilled parents would be with my idea of the education needed for a strong democracy; the ability to see through ideology to reality.

He's arguing about teaching methodology while classes are being cut due to lack of funds? While Texan religious right wingers have a strangle hold on our textbook publishers? While teachers in Chicago work from behind wire screens because they're afraid of their own students? This guy needs to get out of the Ivory Tower and teach in a high school for awhile.

Hirsch confuses _language_ with 'background common knowledge'. I think he actually does know the difference between where verbs and adjectives go and who Thomas Jefferson was, but his broad use of _language_ to cover both is the kind of loose use that reflects and/or leads to humanities' fuzzy thinking. It also drives especially crazy those of us who essentially agree with him.

Many changes could encourage more intelligent participation in democracy than what we saw in the forums about health care. One improvement would be more purposeful instruction in how to employ basic rights in our nation--a Democracy 101 class, for example, that taught students how to organize a nonprofit organization, how to file a Freedom of Information Act request for information, how to initiate an FCC or FDA complaint, and so forth. We have been negligent in giving citizens a basic operating manual for our democratic institutions. And we've been allowing to go unchallenged the much publicized corporate view that government is the problem instead of the solution.

Okay, I get Hirsch's point, but having a common background knowledge does not necessarily translate into civil discourse with lucid, cogently presented arguments. As I've stated before, most folks speak in hyperbole that is not even factually true. Perhaps along with a Democracy 101 course we should include a rhetoric or logical thinking course.

"A popular Government," said Madison, "without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy."

Hirsch quotes this sentence and then refers to Benjamin Rush's essay in 1789 and the example of Noah Webster, who also raised the importance of a common schooling experience. And yet the writer's of the nation's constitution deliberately rejected the idea of a federally controlled national education system that would have made more possible and likely the very practice that these writers theorized about. It reflects one of the greatest ironies in American history and public life - we are happy to theorize and philosophize, but adamantly refuse to institute changes of policy and practice to make those theories and philosophies the guide by which we actually make decisions and structure our institutions.

I sympathize in part with Hirsch's lament that our young people seem to not recognize or appreciate the colloquialisms of older generations. However, did not this same transition happen in the era before "he struck out" became a part of this "background common knowledge" that Hirsch longs for? Afterall, we were a nation of cricket players for a long time before we became a nation of baseball enthusiasts. Perhaps what Hirsch is describing is actually simply a transition in the common knowledge of the nation led by the same people who always lead such transitions - the younger generations whose country this will be within the next 25 years.

In that case, it is far less important to me that my 10 year old daughter be able to include such archaic formulations as the "bully pulpit" properly in her own language use, but rather than she understand the concept behind the term and be able to connect that to language that has more meaning for her. It is the ideas, the concepts, the philosophies of the language that we need to teach, not the words themselves that momentarily convey them. Again let's remember that there was a time when cricket actually had a lot of meaning on this side of the pond.

What is wrong with education system?Iam from India, from last sixty years educationalists constantly telling in public that we must change our education system. Indian Education is boon of British government, when they started to rule on India they want clerks,middle class officers so they opened schools and collages their intention was only train young people a good honest obedient servant of British Raj.
Sixty years were over Indian government continue same pattern,our education system is hopeless for to train a students a responsible citizen we are making robot from this education system. I think U.S. have same problem ,then why we are only discussing speaking on this system,why notwe try to change this system,? we have no creative talent or we donot what to change?

The title of this piece could be answered concisely:

Completely.

And the recent redesign of the CHE is a fairly good parody of what happened to education, from K through 12 and then beyond, over the past forty years or so. Uninformed, unqualified, inexperienced, incautious, overconfident, well-meaning people fooling around with a working system seldom improve it.

When some system, whether mechanical or social or whatever, is functioning at a high but by no means optimal level, tinkering with it may possibly improve performance, but the odds are better that it will worsen performance instead. The more thorough the tinkering, the greater the chances of causing the system to fail.

That's what happened. My generation cheerfully and confidently applied our complete lack of expertise to education, secure in the belief that we could do no wrong, and we have found out that we didn't know what we were doing. In the name of diversity, multiculturalism, etc., we have merely obliterated whatever common ground there was. We've damned near managed to kill off culture.

Never mind. We can all just watch American Idol. Who cares whether we can add and subtract, or remember those pesky dates?

One might argue that most commonly shared knowledge now comes from advertising and popular culture. Why are so many people paranoid about government influence on our minds but not the influence of business and marketing manipulators?

Lots of issues seem muddled to me in the article. The argument being made, I think, is that when we teach grammar, we should also be teaching civics simultaneously, that commonality of language includes a common social, cultural and political repository of allusions and information. While I understand the desire to kill two birds with one stone, grammatical education in this country is already suffering from too little attention and too many objectives in too few lessons. The majority of students have no idea what a complete sentence is and why they should care, and these things are basic to communication. So let's not compound that problem by making grammar teachers become civics teachers as well. Sometimes a pure lesson on the purpose of the comma is necessary.

If you want students to be better informed, they need to read more, pure and simple. That is where they will pick up these cultural signposts. But in order to read - really read - they need more time, to get through a whole novel, or to complete Emerson's essays, or to read the newspapr, or to investigate allusions to the word "bully pulpit" - which they can do easily now with the internet, but don't do because it slows them down. Everything they do is timed now, so they get it done quickly (which is, after all, what they've been asked to do). But the result is often shoddy and shallow.

I recall reading in an SF novel years ago of a society in which all verbal communications were excerps from one of three stories; one, a childrens' story, to express simple ideas, the second, an extensive saga, excerpts from which were used to express most adult-level dealings, and the third, an enormous work, which was learned by the intelligensia (priests, rulers, etc.) which expressed the most specialized, subtle and/or complex ideas.
At the time I read it, I realized that, in a less explicit manner, we all use words and phrases this way, although our source references are less universally known.
An educated person who is familiar with Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Dante's Commedia is in a position to communicate a large repertoir of ideas with another who has the same literary familiarity.
Learning a language is much more than learning the word-for-word equivalents in the other speech; to learn it well means learning the contextual meaning of the words and phrases, which is to say it is learning the culture as well as the words.
Culturally isolated groups in the US (or elsewhere) cannot master the use of the langage without a familiarity with the cultural contexts in which the originators spoke (speak).
To the extent that "cultural awareness" produces mutual respect and understanding, it can further the development of a common cultural context; to the extent it leads to separation (in language, social events, media sources), however, it dooms the minority to continual isolation.

Well, there he goes again.

Having dissertated 30 years ago on Hirsch's "hermeneutics" and his less than adequate and at times simple-minded notion of literary interpretation, I feel a sense of deja vu. He's maintained his superb ability to miss the point, score easy debater points, contrive straw men, and then walk away as if he had all the answers. I feel like saying "stop this guy before he writes again," but that would be impolite and oh so "undemocratic" or, worse, un-civil.

Hirsch simply isn't sufficiently self aware to acknowledge the inadequacies of the content-based curriculum he cherishes,nor is he wise enough to admit the ineptitude of those who contrived the NCLB Act. He's got this bug in his ear about the bad guys, like Dewey, and those evil whole language people whom he loves to demonize as delighting, like most "progressives," in spreading ignorance.

He tells us "Despite intense efforts driven by the No Child Left Behind Act, the language abilities of our 17-year-olds have remained stuck at the steeply declined levels of the 1970s," but isn't self critical enough to wonder whether these "efforts" weren't, after all, only a benefit to testmakers, and were, according to all too many teachers, actually a pernicious influence on teaching (see Miller's Harper's essay last year on working to "train" teachers to teach for the test, the effects of these "testing efforts" on school climate, and especially students and their attitude toward learning.)

Hirsch tells us: "the chief effort in the teaching of "reading" in the schools has been to drill students in how-to exercises like "finding the main idea" and "questioning the author" while neglecting systematic instruction in the background knowledge required for participation in the American public sphere." Really? This is a familiar Hirsch ploy: the flat dualism is stated as unavoidable antithesis. You can't find the main idea or controlling purpose of a piece of writing, or question the author EXCEPT by ignoring all that "background knowledge" you need for civic participation. Got that? Choose sides and start figthing. Hirsch did the same thing in his work on literary interpretation: either you understand a work as the author intended it, that is, relate it to its own time, or, more often than not, risk misinterpreting it by anachronistically relating it to your own time. In his earlier work Hirsch is brilliant at contriving a host of relevance seeking 60's type students bent on ignoring "what the author meant" in offering their allegedly narcissistic interpretations of poems. (For Hirsch, interpretation happens only when people argue over textual meaning; they never work together to create shared meaning.)

One thing I also learned from Hirsch's work in literary theory is this academic talent for straw manning. He's brilliant at it. It makes it so easy for you to choose up sides. And that, as with all fundamentalists' thinking, is always the problem. How cleverly he is at suggesting that this impoverished sense of reading is all students ever get, and that there are no other classes where "reading" does anything more than prevent students from learning all those community-building "facts" that will make them good citizens. You know, in history classes, all the students are doing is looking "for the main idea" rather than getting those vital facts straight --- which, though Hirsch might disagree, explains how George bush won 8 years.

Hirsch presents himself as having spent many years in what he calls "the educational trenches." I wonder. Let's consider the deteriorating state of one of those "trenches," higher education, and, in particular, the field of composition or writing, the majority of whose teachers are rewarded with lousy temporary part-time low wage jobs for performing a service so important to civic life, namely, the teaching of clear expression and understanding of how to read and write rhetorically with an ear and eye for how language works to persuade and win authority for a variety of audiences. Such teaching, at the center of a liberal education, and traditionally regarded, justifiably, as preparation for civic, not merely academic life, continues to be disparaged and unrewarded by the profession which he chose. I don't ever recall in his career that he, unlike Wayne Booth and many others (see Crosswhite's RHETORIC OF REASON, or Booth's THE VOCATION OF A TEACHER), did much to speak out or change the woeful neglect of this particular liberal art. I suspect he was too busy working on those money -making books of lists that assured parents what, depending on their grade level, their kiddies needed to know to compete adequately in the game of life (i.e. "global economy") and, oh yes, be armed with the necessary cultural knowledge for chit-chat at cocktail parties --- you know, the kind`of knowledge that brings "us" all "together."
Kumbaya.

But let's agree with Hirsch that the dreams of those like Horace Mann are worth repeating and praising. And let us ask why, given such ideals concerning the meaning, purpose and value of public education, it is often the case that educational inequalities within that system persist. THAT is what I would like to see the likes of Hirsch talking about. I want to read more pieces by people like Mark Slouka whose essay "DEHUMANIZED" in September's Harper's does much more than Hirsch's to alert us about some real issues in education. Unlike Hirsch, he thinks deeply and provocatively and knowledgably about education. It's a good antidote against Hirsch's half-truths and distortions. Mark Edmundson recent work on reading and teaching can also protect us from Hirschean formulas for what ails education.

A lot of the educational problems in America can be traced back to multi-culturalism.

The philosophy of multi-culturalism gives Blacks and Latinos the socially accepted space that allows them to maintain their own sub-culture, within American culture. This is a novel thing in American history. The way Americans formed a common culture, and shared values, was for immigrants in the past to work hard to fit into the dominant prevailing culture. Now, they don't have to.

A lot of lower class blacks speak a different dialect of English, with patterns of thought and language different than the norm. President Obama, on the other hand, absorbed all the cultural norms of "white culture", as well as black, and is comfortable in either. He is our first bi-cultural president.

I have no problem with Latinos and Blacks maintaining their sub-cultures, if these cultures would equip them with the patterns of thought and behavior that helped them succeed in the broader culture. However, this is not true.

I have no empirical data to back this up, but my guess is that black sub-culture, having evolved out of a slave past, does not put much emphasis on educational achievement and stable home patterns necessary to academic achievement.

Contrast this to Asian Americans, who are succeeding beyond the norm. If you look up the official online U.S. government compilation of statistics, "A Statistical Abstract of the U.S." and look up educational achievement levels for whites an Asian, you will find Asians achieve higher levels of educations than whites, and earn more income than white.

So while racism was certainly a problem in the past, it's clear that, given sufficient motivation and stable family backgrounds and correct cultural values, non-white skin in no longer a barrier to economic achievement in America.

Black leaders should take heart from this, and lessons. Asians are outworking whites, they are out-educating whites; you could say they are out-whiting whites. Blacks should do the same.

My guess is if someone measured the time and effort put into study by Asian Americans, over the course of their education, you would find they work harder at school than whites, and much harder than blacks.

It is considered to be racist to say, "blacks are lazy", yet if a reliable statistical measurement of cumulative academic effort, over the educational timespan of blacks were quantified, I would guess that blacks put less effort into school than whites, and much less effort than Asians.

I would guess also, that, relative to Asians, taking a quantitative measure of the effort of white kids, relative to Asian kids, one could conclude that white kids are often "lazy".

Having spent several years, as a white person, who grew up mostly in a dominantly Chinese subculture in Vancouver Canada, it was obvious to me that the cultural norms in that community were a bit different than general white culture. There was more daily pressure on kids to do their homework. Everything was a bit more serious. Children were expected to go to university.

This resulted in a couple of local jokes:

The local Canadian university, the University of British Columbia, or UBC, is locally known as the "United Brotherhood of Chinese", while the local technical institute, British Columbia Institute of Technology, BCIT, is known as Basic Chinese in Training.

Multi-culturalism is well meaning in it's effort to promote tolerance. But one of the unintended consequences of that philosophy is that it dissipates cultural pressure for minorities to fit into the norm, and adopt the cultural identity and habits of the dominant cultural group, ie whites, and this will likely slow down economic progress and justice, for Blacks and Latinos.

Liberals need to re-think their beliefs, from one of encouraging diversity, without thought to honestly assessing intrinsic cultural deficiencies within the Black and Latino communities, that are, in fact, holding Blacks and Latinos back. Of course, liberals feel so guilty about the racist past sins of whites, and are so intimidated by Black anger, that it seems unlikely they will grow the spine necessary to address this issue.

It is well known that whites will be in the minority in America, within 40 years or so. Latinos have much higher birth rates than whites, and an estimated 40 million Mexicans have wandered across the border in search of a better life. In a few decades their proportion of the population will be quite large. America will be a society where whites and Asians are successful, and blacks and Latinos continue to lag behind, fueling bitterness and resentment.

In short, if America wants to educate her citizens to compete in the 21st century, multi-culturalism must go. Non-racial, commonly accepted social norms must be applied to all populations equally.

Currently the top 20% of America is as well educated a population as any on the planet. Most of those people are white. What happens to a country and an economy, when the educated class, in this case white people, go from 20% of the population, to 10%. Can a modern economy still function at it's current level? Frankly, I doubt it. What is much more likely is that all this will result in the long-term decline in dominance, of the United States. Countries like China, where educational standards are high, will eventually fill the world leadership voice.

As Bruce Springsteen put it, "Glory days, pass you by. Glory days, in the blink of a young girl's eyes. Glory days"

Systematic indoctrination "in the background knowledge required for participation in the American public sphere" begs many questions: Is this same knowledge needed for the children of Boston brahmins, southern blacks, Mexican gardeners, refugees, and Philippino caregivers? Do all of our children need a common mythos to communicate with each other?

BTW, Hirsch, American English is not the standard language of the USA. We are truly a melting pot with many diverse languages, and diverse frames of reference that provide the requisite background knowledge to articulate the US American experience.

Cricket is as American as baseball in the eyes of an immigrant from South Asia.

A canon for children is very effective in single-party countries like Red China.

An official language only serves to exclude, and an official paradigm begun in childhood education only serves to control.

The best thing that we can teach young readers is "finding the main idea" and "questioning the author"; critical linguistic competence is a survival skill. A universal love for baseball is hardly a pedagogical goal worth taking seriously.

Hirsch's essay is perfect fodder for teaching critical linguistics to secondary and post-secondary students, BTW. Don't let blowhards like him decide our educational policy.

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That S Asian immigrant that you deride is an American now, despite your chutney-hating racist ad hominem attacks.

How is pointing out that baseball is more American than cricket racist?

Your deleted post contained a suggestion, among other things, that the USA deport immigrants that don't like baseball. I suggest next time you spew racial epithets at a South Asian immigrant that you consider one thing: cricket bats are much larger than baseball bats. So wear a helmet and a good pair of running shoes.