Word: hirsch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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. 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...
Stripped of its apocalyptic tone, what this amounts to is an advocacy of teaching names, dates and places by rote and providing a context later. Hirsch acknowledges that the method has been derided since Dickens satirized Pedant Thomas Gradgrind ("Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!") in Hard Times. But, he counters, "it isn't facts that deaden the minds of young children, who are storing facts in their minds every day with astonishing voracity. It is incoherence -- our failure to ensure that a pattern of shared, vividly taught, and socially enabling knowledge will emerge from our instruction...
...exactly what knowledge will be vividly taught? Cultural Literacy is obviously meant to provoke serious debate. But when it leaves the theoretical and lands on the practical, it executes a pratfall. Hirsch and two academic colleagues offer a 64-page appendix of references that constitutes their version of vital information. They never do get around to telling the reader that Brownian motion is a random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum...