Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 81
POSTMODERN DEMENTIA
democratic citizenship and that disadvantaged students need to
close the achievement gap and climb the class ladder. Academic
critics were so angry at the very idea of cultural literacy-that is,
of a body of knowledge common to informed individuals, made
use of continually in their criticisms-that they did not even try to
follow the scientific evidence showing how essential that knowledge is to basic and advanced literacy. (4)
Thus does yesterday's liberal become today's reviled reactionary. E. D. Hirsch, a traditional liberal (the oxymoron is intentional),
offers a typically liberal, scientific program to diminish inequality,
and for his pains is hoisted into the academic tumbril and carted
off to the guillotine of progressive disdain.
Most of the remaining essays in the book similarly expound
how liberal desiderata for education and society are relentlessly
undermined by the effects of liberalism on academic institutions
and society as a whole-although most of the authors evidently
fail to notice the connection. Hirsch, for example, beats his breast
over what he now sees as a subtle tactical failure in his controversial argument: "If only I had given greater emphasis in Cultural
Literacy to that scientific point about the fruitlessness of extensive skill drills, the practical impact of the book might have been
greater" (9). It is difficult to conceive how Hirsch could believe that
a slight shift in emphasis would have won over his critics, since he
says himself, "Metaphorically speaking, the book was burned" (5).
I
n the first essay of part 1 of the Bauerlein-Bellow collection, "The
Troubling Trend of Cultural IQ," Bauerlein himself broods over
the striking discrepancy between the remarkable rise in measurable IQ (intelligence defined as a "capacity for abstraction")
moder nagejour nal .com
81
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Modern Age - Summer 2016
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2016
Contents
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Cover1
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Cover2
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Contents
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