Border Problems, School Problems, and What the Two Share.

I began rereading E.D. Hirsch's CULTURAL LITERACY. Wow. He just says it all so much better than I can.

But he got me thinking about the connection between school problems and border problems. At bottom is the principle that a nation survives by passing on to future generations those things that make it great--not only principles and skills, but also content. And our nation is struggling on two fronts: American-born children are not being taught all that they should, and foreign-born immigrants are not being fully assimilated. These two problems are one.

SAT verbal scores are dropping, not because children are not excellent readers but because they are unfamiliar with so much of the material that writers of English expect an audience to know. In other words, while literate in the sense that they can pronounce the words, the kids are illiterate in the sense of understanding their meaning--because they cannot decode the various allusions and references contained in the passage. So years after Dewey, citing Rousseau, convinced American schools and schools of education to teach only skills without regard for content, men like Hirsch have helped educators to remember the importance of shared knowledge. It's the Venn diagram: you can only communicate about things with which both parties are at least vaugely familiar. Schools are realizing they should teach the right books, the most important history, and that content is crucial. And at some point children should pick up not only our nation's shared history, but also a passionate love for its extraordinary and unique greatness: a City on a hill.

The same should be done for immigrants. Not only their children, but themselves--they need to learn not only that America is a land of opportunity (which they apparently knew before they arrived), but they need to be shown why. And there are reasons--it's not just a happy accident. If immigrants could be thoroughly schooled in this culture, if they could be made culturally literate, then most would also become assimilated--patriotically assimilated.

Peggy Noonan has great thoughts on much of this here. (I dig her wandering, right-brained, totally non-lawyer approach. She's a great writer.)