How to Educate a Citizen

E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780063001947
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrpläne

"Profound, vital and correct. Hirsch highlights the essence of our American being and the radical changes in education necessary to sustain that essence. Concerned citizens, teachers, and parents take note! We ignore this book at our peril." — Joel Klein, former Chancellor of New York City Public Schools

In this powerful manifesto, the bestselling author of Cultural Literacy addresses the failures of America's early education system and its impact on our current national malaise, advocating for a shared knowledge curriculum students everywhere can be taught—an educational foundation that can help improve and strengthen America's unity, identity, and democracy. In How to Educate a Citizen, E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began thirty years ago with his classic bestseller Cultural Literacy, urging America's public schools, particularly at the elementary level, to educate our children more effectively to help heal and preserve the nation. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on "child-centered learning." History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge have been dumbed down by vacuous learning "techniques" and "values-based" curricula; indoctrinated by graduate schools of education, administrators and educators have believed they are teaching reading and critical thinking skills. Yet these cannot be taught in the absence of strong content, Hirsch argues.

The consequence is a loss of shared knowledge that would enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions. A broken approach to school not only leaves our children under-prepared and erodes the American dream but also loosens the spiritual bonds and unity that hold the nation together. Drawing on early schoolmasters and educational reformers such as Noah Webster and Horace Mann, Hirsch charts the rise and fall of the American early education system and provides a blueprint for closing the national gap in knowledge, communications, and allegiance. Critical and compelling, How to Educate a Citizen galvanizes our schools to equip children with the power of shared knowledge.

Part I
The Decline of the Common School

Chapter 1
When Our Schools Abandoned Commonality, We Became a Nation at Risk

I write this farewell book about American early schooling not just as an educator concerned about the quality of our children’s education, but as an American concerned about our survival as a high-achieving, fair, and literate society. Over my long life, I have always been a booster of the United States, ever grateful for the blessings of liberty secured to us by our Constitution. No nation is without failure or shame, but I believe ours to be the best nation on earth—and not just for its spacious skies and amber waves of grain, although these do add to the sense of greatness and possibility. Along with our Constitution, it has been the schoolmistresses and schoolmasters of our past—starting with Noah Webster—who have kept us thriving and unified.

The nation-sustaining enterprise of our schoolteachers must be revived. If this book succeeds in conveying the old message in a new way—a message now validated by recent science—it will joyfully belong to that genre of book that succeeds in elevating rationality and natural science above emotional and religious sentiments of self-righteous certitude and moral indignation. The most recent, quite remarkable science reported in this book should help in that aim. Current brain research and current studies of language show that ethnicity and nationality are far from innate and exclusive properties. Ethnicity and nationality are written1 on our young neocortical blank slates by adults and experience.

Many Americans have gained more than one ethnicity. Those blank slates, as it turns out, can accommodate multiple ethnicities and identities. The currently popular term “identity,” regarded as being immutable by birth and experience, is an inadequate concept. The essence of nationality and ethnicity inheres in a speech community that is based on shared knowledge. We must hope that recent scientific determinations (such as the discovery that the brain area where identity and ethnicity reside begins as a blank slate that our parents, our schools, and our surrounding culture write on) will induce a calmer, more productive consideration of what effective nation making and nation sustaining must entail. That is especially pertinent to our multiethnic nation that was once a symbol of human hope, and can be again.

For decades, I’ve been a rather polite scholar devoted to explaining how America’s public schools, particularly at the elementary level (which is the focus of this book), are failing to educate our children effectively. The elementary school is decisive for forming both our knowledge base and our gut allegiance. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on a “progressive” approach called “child-centered learning” promoted and promulgated by our graduate schools of education. Education officials indoctrinated by those ideas set school standards that are unspecific with regard to content. Teachers, similarly indoctrinated, have gradually abandoned teaching knowledge coherently in favor of teaching mush on the scientifically incorrect premise that they are imparting general reading skills and general critical-thinking skills. But by neglecting their citizen-making duties, they are in fact diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.

History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge that is the mark of an educated citizen have been dumbed down by vacuous learning “techniques” and “values-based” curricula. The results have been devastating: It’s not simply a matter of ignorance (71 percent of Americans believe2 that Alexander Hamilton was president of the United States). The result is also the loss of a shared knowledge base across the nation that would otherwise enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions at the local and national level.

The costs of a broken approach to schooling leave our children underprepared and erode the American Dream. But there’s an even deeper cost. Without schooling that teaches shared knowledge, the spiritual bonds that hold our society together are loosened. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. put it this way3 in The Disuniting of America: “The bonds of national cohesion are sufficiently fragile already. Public education should aim to strengthen those bonds, not to weaken them. If separatist tendencies go on unchecked, the result can only be the fragmentation, re-segregation, and tribalization of American life.” Public discourse becomes increasingly uninformed and vitriolic, belief in political leadership dramatically declines, and disagreement over policy is translated into demonization of the other.

In the nation as a whole there is now a knowledge gap, a communications gap, and an allegiance gap. We don’t understand one another; we don’t trust one another; we don’t like one another. Every Fourth of July, the Gallup poll reports a further decline in American patriotism and national pride. It has become fashionable to question patriotism and contrast it with a nobler globalism. But I believe Émile Durkheim was right to say4 that the nation-state is the largest possible unified social entity. Recent history has backed him up. We need global cooperation—yes, but Teddy Roosevelt was deeply right to say5 that the best contributors to international well-being and cooperation are unified, patriotic nations.

Failed Schooling and an Angry Population

Without the anchor of commonality in schooling that we largely had up to the 1940s, our ship of state is heading for a crash that it may not survive. There is already talk of secession. In 2017, in California one-third of polled voters said they would support their state declaring independence and becoming a separate country. In 2016, over a quarter of Texans said the same thing. Other states have prosecession groups campaigning to break away from the union. And while these impulses are not specifically tied to education, only an educated and patriotic citizenry can reverse this impulse.

This book will show that our loss of cohesion is partly owing to a loss of commonality in what we teach and therefore in what we know. At both the local and national level, an economy and a democracy can work effectively only if people understand one another. Language specialists use the term “speech community” to describe a group of people who share a set of language norms that allow them to interact, share interests, and participate in a healthy community. On a national level, this commonality is missing. The American Dream—the belief, unique to our nation, that anyone can rise from humble origins to achieve success—is fast becoming an American fantasy.

I addressed this politely in my initial critique, Cultural Literacy (1987), but it was met with the kind of fierce uproar from education professors and columnists that one would expect to be launched against a dangerous subversion of American liberties and social progress. Since the book was in its substance a report on the latest news from cognitive psychology, I was surprised at the ideological protest.

What it came down to was this: That earlier book contained a list of five thousand subjects and concepts that I suggested every child should learn. My critics den...