Schooling and the New Illiteracy

Recent developments in higher education have progressively diluted its content and reproduced, at a higher level, the conditions that prevail in the public schools. The collapse of general education; the abolition of any serious effort to instruct students in foreign languages; the introduction of many programs in black studies, women's studies, and other forms of consciousness raising for no other purpose than to head off political discontent; the ubiquitous inflation of grades – all have lowered the value of a university education at the same time that rising tuitions place it beyond reach of all but the affluent...

What precipitated the crisis of the sixties was not simply the pressure of unprecedented numbers of students (many of whom would gladly have spent their youth elsewhere) but a fatal conjuncture of historical changes: the emergence of a new social conscience among students activated by the moral rhetoric of the New Frontier and by the civil rights movement, and the simultaneous collapse of the university's claims to moral and intellectual legitimacy. Instead of offering a rounded program of humane learning, the university now frankly served as a cafeteria from which students had to select so many “credits”. Instead of diffusing peace and enlightenment, it allied itself with the war machine. Eventually, even its claim to provide better jobs became suspect...

At the same time, the student movement embodied a militant anti-intellectualism of its own, which corrupted and eventually absorbed it. Demand for the abolition of grades, although defended on grounds of high pedagogical principle, turned out in practice – as revealed by experiments with ungraded courses and pass-fail options – to reflect a desire for less work and a wish to avoid judgment on its quality. The demand for more “relevant” courses often boiled down to a desire for an intellectually undemanding curriculum, in which students could win academic credits for political activism, self-expression, transcendental meditation, encounter therapy, and the study and practice of witchcraft. Even when seriously advanced in opposition to sterile academic pedantry, the slogan of relevance embodied an underlying antagonism to education itself – an inability to take an interest in anything beyond immediate experience...

In the seventies, the most common criticism of higher education revolves around the charge of cultural elitism... Two contributors to a Carnegie Commission report on education condemn the idea that “there are certain works that should be familiar to all educated men” as inherently an “elitist notion.”... The Carnegie Commission contributors argue that since the United States is a pluralist society, “adherence exclusively to the doctrines of any one school... would cause higher education to be in great dissonance with society.”

Given the prevalence of these attitudes among teachers and educators, it is not surprising that students at all levels of the educational system have so little knowledge of the classics of world literature....

Those who teach college today see at first hand the effect of these practices, not merely in the students' reduced ability to read and write but in the diminished store of their knowledge about the cultural traditions they are supposed to inherit. With the collapse of religion, biblical references, which formerly penetrated deep into everyday awareness, have become incomprehensible, and the same thing is now happening to the literature and mythology of antiquity – indeed, to the entire literary tradition of the West, which has always drawn so heavily on biblical and classical sources. In the space of two or three generations, enormous stretches of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” so often invoked by educators but so seldom taught in any form, have passed into oblivion. The effective loss of cultural traditions on such a scale makes talk of a new Dark Age far from frivolous. Yet this loss coincides with an information glut, with the recovery of the past by specialists, and with an unprecedented explosion of knowledge – none of which, however, impinges on everyday experience or shapes popular culture.

The resulting split between general knowledge and the specialized knowledge of the experts, embedded in obscure journals and written in language or mathematical symbols unintelligible to the layman, has given rise to a growing body of criticism and exhortation. The ideal of general education in the university, however, has suffered the same fate as basic education in the lower schools. Even those college teachers who praise general education in theory find that its practice drains energy from their specialized research and thus interferes with academic advancement. Administrators have little use for general education, since it does not attract foundation grants and large-scale government support. Students object to the reintroduction of requirements in general education because the work demands too much of them and seldom leads to lucrative employment.

Under these conditions, the university remains a diffuse, shapeless, and permissive institution that has absorbed the major currents of cultural modernism and reduced them to a watery blend, a mind-emptying ideology of cultural revolution, personal fulfillment, and creative alienation.

КЛЮЧИ К УСТАНОВОЧНЫМ УПРАЖНЕНИЯМ ЧАСТИ I

Инфинитив

I. Инфинитив

1... которое защитит...; 2... которые будут запущены...; 13... чтобы включать...; 14... по ознакомлению...; 15... по сбору...; 19... настолько, чтобы ослабить...; 24... не первый..., кто вступает в должность...; 38... и увидел...; 39... и сам оказался жертвой...; 41... неизбежно (обязательно) будут признаны...; 44... неспособность достичь согласия...; 46... не добились успеха...; 50. Начать с того, что (во-первых)...; 52. Если судить о... /оценивать...;