Are Student Heads Full of Emptiness?

By Ezra Bowen

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 sun.

Yet there they are. Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, with the 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 a flawed derivative of Nietzsche's nihilism. Under its influence, higher education has failed to keep the flame of true learning or guide today's students, many of whom appear to Bloom to be sex-ridden moneygrubbers marching to the beat of rock music ("commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy," says the professor). The only sure way back, he claims, is to re- establish the disciplines of the liberal arts, with the classic philosophers and European savants at the heart of the curriculum.

+ Hirsch, 59, a professor of English, aims his blast at academe from a slightly different sniper's perch. He charges that schools have given up teaching the unifying facts, values and writings of Western culture, creating a generation of cultural illiterates. As evidence he cites a 1985 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Among other lacunae, it found that two-thirds of the high schoolers surveyed did not know when the Civil War was fought, and half could not identify Winston Churchill. "One's literacy depends upon the breadth of one's acquaintance with a national culture," Hirsch writes.

Hirsch's villain is Educational Philosopher John Dewey, who, in his landmark 1915 treatise Schools of Tomorrow, espoused the learning of skills rather than information. The long-range result, says Hirsch, is that children can now decode words but lack the understanding to put what they read into broad, insightful context. The Hirsch antidote: heavy doses of Western cultural lore, as represented by a list of nearly 5,000 entries in an appendix labeled "What Literate Americans Know," ranging from A ("act of God") to Z ("Zeitgeist"), and including "1066" and "White Christmas (song)." Knowing at least a commercial idea when it sees one, namely the untrivial sales impact of the list, Houghton Mifflin promises more where it came from, i.e., a dictionary of cultural terms and perhaps an electronic game to test cultural literacy.

Ultimately, Hirsch would like to see a Western thought-centered curriculum prescribed for the nation's schools. His stated concern is that "all kids should have access to cultural literacy, not just an elite few." He is particularly worried about disadvantaged students, who, he says, are not likely to get such training at home and, without careful teaching in school, may miss the opportunity of being absorbed into society's mainstream.

While praise in academe has hardly been unanimous for Bloom and Hirsch, the two have got raves from some powerful and diverse educators. Secretary of Education William Bennett, a staunch conservative who has beaten the Western drum while beating up on the colleges for the same perceived derelictions as Bloom denounced, calls the Chicago philosopher's work a "brilliant book, a phenomenon" that "points out where higher education has gone wrong and what we need to fix it." Bennett says, "Too many schools ignore the great minds and instead try to teach kids how to make a living."

Bennett has some markedly ecumenical company, including Carnegie Foundation President Ernest Boyer, a liberal. Boyer's 1986 book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America takes higher education to task for disjointed careerist study programs, confusion over goals and lack of a liberal arts core curriculum. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, declares himself a Hirsch fan. "Education holds our society together only as long as what is taught has value and is important," he says. "You can't teach reading with comic books and rock-star magazines and expect kids to be educated."

Bill Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction, concurs. "We need to have that cultural understanding," he says. "There should be agreement -- whether in Portland, Ore., or Portland, Me. -- that you're going to learn something about freedom and justice." And John Silber, iconoclastic president of Boston University, declares that "Bloom and Hirsch are on the best-seller list because people around the country are just starving for this."

The authors think they know who their hungry readers are. Hirsch claims approval both from elders for his calling up of "what education used to be," and from those in their 20s who favor the book because they believe they have been shortchanged. Bloom reports that interest in his book "seems to come from parents who have lived for so long with the formulas and bromides from the '60s about how you educate your children. It somehow played upon a parental concern that hadn't found a voice." Bloom also feels that he, like Hirsch, has aroused the concern of disaffected students. One editor of a major college newspaper recently told him, "We all felt we had been robbed of our educations, but we didn't know how to articulate it."

The books' publishers, while dutifully crediting the quality of their authors' insights, acknowledge some plain marketing luck. "It's a cyclical thing," says Robert Asahina, Bloom's editor. "It started ((in 1955)) with Why Johnny Can't Read, and we just hit it right on the nose with this book, totally accidentally, of course."

The reaction to the books in much of academe has been chilly. Harvard President Derek Bok slapped at Bloom and other education gadflies in a recent speech, observing, "When times are bad, the public will look for scapegoats, and education is often an attractive candidate." Others, like University of Virginia Philosopher Richard Rorty, respect Bloom's learning but take issue with what they see as his intellectual bias. "Bloom says that anyone who doesn't see the world as Plato sees it just doesn't know what's going on. It's very fundamentalist in that these people called the 'philosophers' take the place of the 'saved,' and if you haven't had the experience of reading Plato, then it's as if you weren't 'born again.' " Warming to the task, Rorty adds sardonically, "Everyone knows that the real people that matter are dead Greeks and Germans." Bloom, he concludes, "doesn't really believe that America exists as an intellectual culture. He writes as if we were completely at the mercy of bright Europeans occasionally washing up on these shores and telling us where the ideas came from."

Mortimer Adler, educational philosopher and publisher of the Great Books series, pronounces the new volumes "silly." Says he: "Schools are bad. We didn't need the Bloom book to find that out. Everything Bloom complains about is what ((the late Chicago University President Robert)) Hutchins and I talked about in the '30s." As for Hirsch's work, he says, "that book is a best seller because people play it the way they play Trivial Pursuit." Wayne Booth, a Chicago English professor who attended a meeting of 60 high school and college English teachers, reports they are concerned. "What scares all of them is that both books will be taken by the wrong handle, that the list at the back of Hirsch's book will be taken as something to be taught directly. It's an absurd reduction of the problem."

Among the more even voices in the debate is that of Saul Cooperman, New Jersey's commissioner of education. He agrees that standards of learning must be set -- provided the standards are broad enough to embrace the entire world. "How can we get into the mind of Islamic fundamentalism," he asks, "unless we know what Islam is? We had better learn about people like Saladin, that he wasn't just some jerk riding a camel. With the world getting smaller, we can't just sit here saying 'My country right or wrong.' " Hirsch denies any jingoism or other implications of conservatism in his educational agenda. "This is not a conservative issue," he says. "This is a liberal idea." Bloom too denies any conservative bias, or Western bias for that matter. "Actually the book goes right up the center," he claims, "touching on the concerns of all rational Americans."

Along with quarrels on ideology, perhaps the most intense objections to Bloom's and Hirsch's doctrines come from educators who feel that many of the ideas are out of touch with countrywide classroom realities. Says Ralph Cusick, principal of Chicago's 3,900-pupil, predominantly Hispanic Schurz High School: "What people lose sight of is that we've got to educate everybody -- even the 35 IQs -- and we've got them in school." Last year Schurz also had more than 20 student suicide attempts, with only one counselor to help every 400 youngsters -- not atypical of big-city schools around the country. The trouble begins before school does, says Cusick. Children come into kindergarten "not knowing colors or letters. You walk into houses, the radio is blasting, the TV is blasting, and babies are crawling on the floor. I really think a lot of the answers are in early childhood." He finishes his list of ills with the failure of communities and the nation to train and reward good teachers properly. "We don't want to pay or respect them," he says. Hence, "we're not attracting the teachers we should."

The best sellers are criticized as well for urging a set of educational values that fail to take into account the pluralism and vast inequities in the U.S. educational system. Bloom, for example, harshly criticizes American universities for allegedly lowering standards to admit black students. And he objects to specialized courses like black studies, which he calls a "form of segregation." Such opinions have led many black educators to take him to task. Kenneth Tollett, professor of higher education at Howard University, accuses Bloom of "monumental insensitivity" toward blacks. They face great cultural barriers on white campuses, Tollett points out. "Special efforts are needed to help students overcome this culture shock."

The number of faultfinding responses have satisfied the authors as much -- well, almost -- as the number of readers. Bloom notes that his purpose was never to offer a full range of solutions but rather to raise questions and, perhaps too, the level of debate. That, both of them have done, along with some hackles. And while some educators concede, however grudgingly, that the bottom line on both books is their extraordinary ability to engage the nation in a renewed dialogue on education, others say the very popularity of the books is the most powerful argument against their theses. For where but in a well-educated country would so many people turn in the heat of summer from the ) usual pop reading fare of sex, scandal and psychiatry to immerse themselves in two tomes about education?

With reporting by Lawrence Malkin/Boston and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago