A Liberal's Cry of Despair: America's Public Schools No Longer Teach New Deal Nationalism
By Gary North
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/07/gary-north/liberals-cry-despair/ For three decades, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has been one of the foremost defenders of the American public schools. He has also been a critic of the content of American education. None of criticism has gained any traction in the schools.
I did a search on Google for “E. D. Hirsch” and “public schools.” I got a lot of hits, as you can see here.
He has few critics. He also has no supporters with any power inside the schools. At age 89, he still has nothing to show for his time in redesigning the public school curriculum.
Hirsch wrote a best-selling book that appeared in 1987: Cultural Literacy. It presented the basics of what an educated American needs to know early in life — no later than college. The public schools were supposed to teach this, he said. They didn’t. The book was utopian then. It is a faded memory today. The public schools do not impart such knowledge. They haven’t since the end of World War II.
He has finally come to his senses. He is in despair. It a recent article, he offers a lament. It is, in fact, a funeral oration of a corpse. It appeared in a digital publication: Democracy. Democracy has been the religion of secular humanism for two centuries. His article is titled “A Sense of Belonging.” The article shows what he sees as the world we have lost.
It is the world that Hirsch and his liberal peers have lost. It is the world that some of us have been criticizing for half a century and which generations of Catholic resisters criticized ever since they got off the ships from Ireland in the 1840’s. Massachusetts was the last state to abandon tax-supported churches. That was in 1833. In 1837, the state created a replacement church, the department of education. The man who ran it was a liberal Unitarian lawyer, Horace Mann. Catholic immigrants a decade later recognized the Boston public schools for what they were: Unitarian training centers. In poverty, they started Catholic private schools. Not until the 1970’s did the bishops pull back in their support of independent schools.
THE QUEST FOR COMMUNITY
Hirsch begins with comments on a recent book, Tribe.
In one of its chapters, Tribe interprets the psychology of veterans who falsely claim post-traumatic stress disorder. Men and women who served in the military with patriotism and loyalty, and who would never c***t the fellow members of their military units, are willing to c***t their fellow citizens in civilian life by lying about their medical conditions. Veterans are feeling alienated and isolated in contemporary America. They prefer their anxiety-filled wartime experiences among close-connected comrades to their current meaning-deprived existences.This paradox is explained, Junger argues, by the loss in modern America of a basic psychological fulfillment—a feeling of group solidarity and a sense of belonging.
Back in 1953, conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote a book on the origins of European totalitarianism. It was titled The Quest for Community. He attributed the rise of totalitarianism to a similar loss of a sense of community that took place in Western Europe in the first half of the 20th century....