A Liberal's Cry of Despair: America's Public Schools No Longer Teach New Deal Nationalism

Historian Gary North has the article of the day:

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.

An article well worth your time.