“The Dumbest Generation” author Mark Bauerlein has an interesting piece about Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bauerlein has a good grasp of his work on cultural literacy and curriculum, but his piece is about Hirsch’s career before Core Knowledge–work that set Hirsch “at the forefront of literary study.”
I don’t know of any publication in which Hirsch explains why he stopped doing critical theory; or, indeed, why he exited the whole high-powered/grad school/research humanities world. We may assume, though, that Hirsch simply drew a sweeping conclusion over the course of the 1970s: Literary theory and literary study were drifting ever farther from the pressing intellectual needs of 19-year-olds. Students were coming into college with cultural-literacy deficits, and humanities professors weren’t responding. All the incentives of professional success steered professors away from the freshman classroom, not to mention from the pre-college years, and glamour of a symposium in which theory stars hashed out Derrida’s latest turned a composition class into sheer drudgery. That didn’t change the fact that the help students needed came properly in elementary and middle school, and Hirsch directed his attention accordingly. His example is worth remembering.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was clearly wrong.
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