While at the Grand Canyon last week, I spent time reading the journals of the members of the 1869 Powell expedition down the Colorado River. It’s impossible not to be struck by the everyday erudition of Americans of even modest educational attainment of earlier times.
George Bradley described how he “would be willing to explore the River Styx” if it meant getting out of the Army. Later he described a particularly rough night on the river. “We need only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton’s most vivid conceptions of Hell,” he wrote.
It’s hard to imagine such allusions finding their way into the diaries of even the best educated contemporary Americans, let alone a sixth-grade dropout like Bradley. Spend some time reading the letters of ordinary Americans of the 19th century and you immediately grasp how much poorer our discourse is for a lack of a common set of references. It’s lack makes the lowest common denominator not merely lamentable, but necessary for us simply to understand each other.
The problem is, as soon as you start urging people (okay, administrators and other teachers) about the need for this core, you get slapped with the elitism stick.
I’m not sure it has to be that way, Adso. Look at some of the work that Dan Willingham, Hirsch and others have written about the connection between literacy and reading comprehension. Content and comprehension are two sides of the same coin. As I alluded to in my post, when we don’t have common references, discourse becomes strained beyond a rudimentary level. It’s not elitism, but a simple matter of guaranteeing every kid what he or she needs to understand and be understood by every other kid. It’s the very opposite of elitism.