College and Research Libraries Recent Publications FEATURED BOOK REVIEW ESSAY The Call to Reform Liberal Education: Great Books of 1987 Susan Klingberg Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. 392p. $18.95 (ISBN 0- 671-47990-3). LC 86-24768. Boyer, Ernest L. College: The Undergraduate Experience in America. New York: Harper, 1987. 328p. (ISBN 0-06-015507- 8). LC 85-45182. Hirsch, Jr., E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 251p. $16.95 (ISBN 0-395-43095-X). LC 86-21352. Ravitch, Diane, and Chester E. Finn, Jr. What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? ARe- port on the First National Assessment of History and Literature. New York: Harper, 1987. 293p. $15.95 (ISBN 0-06- 015849-2). LC 87-45432. Wolf, Howard, The Education of a Teacher: Essays on American Culture. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987. 299p. $22.95 (ISBN 0-87975-374-9). LC 87- 10885. A remarkable number of titles was pub- lished in 1987 analyzing college teaching and learning and the educational achieve- ment of college students. Four of the most significant titles are discussed here. Since academic preparation for college is a closely related topic, What Do Our 17-Year- Olds Know? is also reviewed. This cluster- ing of titles on undergraduate education signals a strong trend toward assessing student literacy levels and improving college-level instruction . This reform movement is not taking place solely within academe. These serious works, published in trade presses, are reaching a very wide popular audience. Both Closing of the American Mind and Cultural Literacy have enjoyed a number of weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Susan Klingberg is Education and Social Science Librarian at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801 . 278 Many striking similarities exist among these five titles. First, with the exception of Wolf's book, a collection of essays span- ning twenty years, the views expressed are conservative. The current educational reform movement is a conservative, back- to-basics movement, and these books are representative of it. The politics of educa- tion swing back and forth, like a pendu- lum, left to right. The reform movement of the eighties is a right-of-center response to the university reforms of the sixties, which grew out of leftist student activism. This essay aims to explore the following important themes these works have in common: 1. Literate Americans share a core body of knowledge. 2. What an educated person should know is definable. 3. Teaching should emphasize mastery of content over skills development. 4. Knowledge has an important cultural component (cultural literacy). 5. A return to a structured curriculum is needed. 6. Good assessment programs are es- sential to the quality of teaching and learn- ing. 7. College success or failure is depen- dent on solid academic preparation '(pre- school to high school). THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND The Closing of the American Mind is a strong, personal indictment of the current moral, social, and intellectual orders pre- vailing in the U.S. According to author Al- lan Bloom, liberal education is in crisis, re- flecting nationwide decay. Bloom's description of the decline of liberal educa- tion draws heavily on his long career teaching classics at Cornell and the Uni- versity of Chicago. The author views the four years of liberal-arts education as a charmed oppor- tunity for the privileged young Americans who enjoy them. The college years are a grace period following the intellectual and cultural wasteland of adolescence and preceding the likelihood of dreary profes- sional training. During those years, stu- dents have the unique opportunity to ex- Recent Publications 279 pand experience, explore alternatives, and engage in self-discovery. They can be- gin to fulfill their human potential by ex- ploring such central philosophical ques- tions as, What is man? (p.21). Bloom observes that entering freshmen are ill prepared to answer these questions because of weak educational back- grounds. Instead of concentrating on mas- tery of content, their previous education has emphasized methods and approaches such as openness and tolerance. Students are taught the wrongheaded notion of cul- tural relativism, which contends that all cultures and values are equal. Bloom, who has a marked preference for European cul- ture, insists that they are not; in seeking what is true and good, students should be encouraged to examine alternatives, weigh differences, and make distinctions based on relative value. Bloom also finds students ignorant of their political heri- tage and lacking in the moral education . that previous generations received through religion and the family, two insti- tutions now in decline. Students do not bring to college strong beliefs that they can then challenge and question. He com- ments 11 One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation" (p.43). Bloom prescribes a remedy addressing the ills of the liberal education curriculum. He believes that the university needs to develop a vision of what constitutes an ed- ucated person. He is in favor of the core curriculum concept because it represents the unity of knowledge and because it im- plies that "there are some things one must know about if one is to be educated" (p.320). He advocates designing a curriculum that will appeal to and nourish the student who is undecided on a concentration or major, who might say "I am a whole hu- man being. Help me to form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real po- tential" (p.339). Currently universities unwittingly encourage lower-division stu- dents to specialize early because they have nothing to offer the undecided major. Bloom points out that the curriculum re- form movement of the eighties is part of a cycle, a reaction to the dismantling of cur- 280 College & Research Libraries riculum requirements during the sixties campus unrest. The current university re- form movement advocates a core curricu- lum. The author describes three possible approaches: a general education curricu- lum, in which students take introductory courses in general divisions of knowl- edge; interdisciplinary composite courses that are specially developed for general education purposes, such as "Man in Na- ture" and "War and Moral Responsibil- ity"; and the "great books" approach. The third alternative, favored by Bloom, is the reading of classic texts, which them- selves dictate key questions and the meth- ods of analysis. He would center the cur- riculum on these texts and would also open up students' minds to the important European philosophers (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche). In spite of his clear preference for this "great books/ great thinkers" approach, Bloom provides an evenhanded analysis and acknowledges its weaknesses: the problems of determining and selecting the great books; the impossibility of reading and studying all of them carefully; the no- tion that the books are the ends rather than the means; and the reputation of the movement as amateurish, evangelistic, and lacking in good taste. Based on his own teaching, Bloom de- scribes the engagement and intellectual excitement experienced by students read- ing the great texts. From these works, they learn about the key philosophical ques- tions as well as the process and methods for analyzing and responding to them. Bloom is most astute and credible when he analyzes and attempts to resolve edu- cational issues and problems. However he also devotes several lengthy chapters to analyzing the American student soul, in- cluding youth culture and politics. Unfor- tunately this analysis suffers from a pro- found generation gap. Bloom demon- strates a narrow, crabbed point of view and a lofty, professorial tone, providing little evidence of understanding or empa- thy with youth culture. He is dismayed by liberated sexual relationships and believes that rock music is addictive and danger- ous. His exaggerated and priggish re- sponses are sometimes humorous. For ex- ample he observes that rock music has May 1988 "the beat of sexual intercourse" (p.73) and the strange power to ruin the imagi- nations of young people. The author has an unfortunate tendency to turn personal observations into social theories that are more anecdotal than scientific. For exam- ple, from his own teaching he concludes that students of divorced parents exhibit ''a slight deformity of the spirit'' and ''are not as open to the serious study of philos- ophy and literature as some other stu- dents are" (p.l20). COLLEGE: THE UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA While Bloom writes from personal expe- rience and in his own voice, College is a study of undergraduate education funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Ad- vancement of Teaching, headed by Ernest L. Boyer. Boyer's prose is grander in tone than Bloom's, befitting the book's venera- ble sponsor. To conduct this study, ob- servers were sent to twenty-nine colleges and universities to get firsthand accounts of campus life. In addition, a national sur- vey of undergraduates and faculty mem- bers, representative of different institu- tions, was undertaken. Like Bloom, the Carnegie report ex- presses concern about the conflict in the undergraduate curriculum between spe- cialized majors and the need to provide ''a coherent view of the human condition" (p.4). The study reviewed the distribution · requirements of general education pro- grams at several colleges, but the report rejects this approach as ineffective be- cause of the enormous number of humani- ties, natural sciences, and social science courses available. Choosing several from each division with no established connec- tions is more likely to be a smorgasboard than a well-coordinated, nourishing meal. To achieve general education goals, the report recommends the integrated core approach, capable of imparting essential knowledge, linking knowledge to life be- yond campus, and making connections across disciplines. The core approach re- - lates the curriculum to the universal expe- riences and activities shared by all people. It consists of seven areas of inquiry that cut across disciplines: • Language: the crucial connection • Art: the aesthetic experience • Heritage: the living past • Institutions: the social web • Nature: ecology of the planet • Work: the value of vocation • Identity: the search for meaning (p.91-92). This approach to curriculum develop- ment is based on several firmly held be- liefs. The report asserts that it is possible to define a basic core of knowledge that all students should be taught and should master to become educated persons. This core knowledge, which is not explicitly outlined in the report, is called "common learning.'' Common learning is not just an end in itself, but a way to discover and un- derstand oneself and to develop a capacity for sound judgment. The implicit chal- lenge to individual colleges is to define common learning, with its emphasis on breadth, and to integrate it successfully with the specialized knowledge acquired through academic majors. Developing a strong sense of commu- nity in students is also recommended. The integrated core is designed not only to promote self-understanding but also to make students aware that they are part of the human community and that their ex- istence has meaning because of others. Building community can be furthered through the academic program. Students should be encouraged to participate in col- laborative activities such as group projects and in small sections within large lecture classes. In this assessment of liberal arts pro- grams, reforming the curriculum is a cen- tral theme. Seven other problem areas are also identified as undermining the success of the liberal arts program: the discontinu- ity between high schools and colleges, in- cluding poor academic preparation; the conflicting faculty priorities of research, teaching, and service; a lack of vigor and commitment in teaching and learning; governing of the college; evaluating edu- cational outcomes; the quality of campus life; and the relationship between the campus and the world. The site visits to campuses pinpointed another weakness in the undergraduate program: the gap between the classroom Recent Publications 281 and the library. Observers noted that text- books were the primary teaching re- sources. Students viewed the library pri- marily as a quiet place to study and to read materials on reserve. The study's written survey of undergraduates revealed that one in four does not use the library at all during a normal week, and 65 percent spend four hours or less in the library. The report also notes that college libraries are not adequately supported. With reference to previous studies using ACRL stan- dards, it notes that only half of four-year college libraries meet the minimum stan- dards for collections, staff, budgets, and services. In spite of these serious criticisms of un- dergraduate education, the report's out- look is not gloomy. The prologue gives a very balanced summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the American college. It is presented as a vital but troubled insti- tution, in need of renewal. To quote from the prologue, "It is not that the failure of the undergraduate college is so large but that institutional expectations often are too small" (p.2). CULTURAL LITERACY Unlike the first two books, which pri- marily critique the college experience, Cul- tural Literacy is not limited to one particu- lar educational level. E. D. Hirsch is concerned with all levels of schooling and focuses on the process of teaching the spe- cific knowledge that each of us needs to know. He believes in an identifiable body of knowledge (factual information and tra- ditionallore) that Americans must master to read well, function in the modern world, and participate in a democracy. He coins the term cultural literacy to represent "the information, attitudes, and assump- tions that literate Americans share" (p.127). Hirsch argues that the well-documented achievement decline of American stu- dents is due to the faulty educational theo- ries and values underlying the curricu- lum. The modern school curriculum is based on a theory of ''educational formal- ism,'' a developmental approach traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau. Formalism views literacy as a set of techniques or skills mastered through practice. In teach- 282 College & Research Libraries ing, it has emphasized acquiring skills, while mastery of content has been seri- ously neglected. For example, in formal- ism reading is primarily a decoding pro- cess that pays little attention to reading for meaning. Hirsch cites several reading research studies showing that, far from merely de- coding, readers supply a good deal of background information not in the text but essential to their understanding. Based on his review of twenty years of reading research, he concludes: "The ex- plicit meanings of a piece of writing are the tip of an iceberg of meaning; the larger part lies below the surface of the text and is composed of the reader's own relevant knowledge" (p.33-34). Hirsch demon- strates convincingly that reading and wtit- ing are dependent on background knowl- edge and are cumulative activities; the more students read, the more information they learn to apply to future reading. Hirsch attributes the failures of modern schooling to its developmental curriculum that teaches reading, writing, and critical thinking as general skills. However, much evidence suggests that this approach is misguided. The author cites recent re- search showing that cognitive skills de- pend on models or schemata specific to a particular task. Hirsch concludes that the educational programs that now teach gen- eral skills are ineffective. Instead, the schools should teach a curriculum strong in traditional information and culture. In Cultural Literacy, Hirsch convincingly demonstrates that modem curriculum de- signers have taken a wrong path, ignoring the important research of the last twenty years on language, memory, and cogni- tive skills. Although he argues strongly and persuasively, he concludes with a bal- anced and conciliatory statement. He ad- vocates that all educators work together to promote literacy: ''Facts and skills are in- separable. There is no insurmountable reason why those who advocate the teach- ing of higher order skills and those who advocate the teaching of common tradi- tional content should not join for- ces"(p.133). Following the books's text is a sixty- four-page appendix that is engaging, tan- talizing, and frustrating and should not be May1988 skipped over. Entitled ''What Literate Americans Know," it is a list of names, terms, dates, events, literary works, and sayings intended as a guide to our literate culture. Unless you know the significance of Diana (Artemis), comme il faut, Fresno (California), op art, Planck's constant, and vestal virgin, you will begin to wonder how well you were e~ucated. The list is challenging, even though it was devel- oped to correspond to a high school liter- acy level. Hirsch plans a follow-up publi- cation to give the associations that the terms should evoke in the mind of a liter- ate person. Several of Hirsch's theses are similar to those of Bloom and Boyer. Bloom is also critical of developmental approaches that emphasize personal growth over mastery of content. Hirsch and Boyer share a deep concern over the incoherence and fragmentation of the curriculum. All three authors grapple with the important ques- tion of what an educated person should know. WHATDOOUR 17-YEAR-OLDS KNOW? In their respective works, Allan Bloom and Ernest Boyer comment on the failure of high schools to educate and prepare students adequately for college. Their views are supported by the results of the First National Assessment of History and Literature (NAHL), administered to high school juniors in 1986. The test, consisting of multiple-choice questions, was de- signed to measure basic information in history and literature. The questions were not designed to be difficult; it was as- sumed that the students would be able to answer most of them. In describing their expectations in What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, the developers of NAHL, Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, state "there are ·some things almost all students should know by the time they are juniors in high school" (p.200-201). According to the scale adopted, 100 is a perfect score and below 60 is failing. In the history portion, the national average was 54.5, while in lit- erature, the average was 51.8; thus, the average student failed both parts. The his- tory score is especially disappointing since most of the questions were on American history and 78.4 percent of the students tested were enrolled in U.S. history classes at the time. Most of the others had taken U.S. history in the ninth or tenth grade. The quthors planned a history and liter- ature assessment because recent efforts to strengthen the curriculum had largely ig- nored these two subjects. As the educa- tional reform movement swept the states, additional science and mathematics courses were most often mandated. The authors believed that courses of substance in history and literature are no longer an integral part of the high school curricu- lum, having been replaced by amorphous courses under the umbrellas of ''social studies" and "language arts." Both authors are prominent educators, which undoubtedly helped them develop the resources needed for this important assessment. Diane Ravitch is adjunct pro- fessor of History and Education at Teach- ers College, Columbia University, and au- thor of several important works on education. Chester E. Finn is professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and currently serves as assis- tant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. Funding for the project was se- cured from the National Endowment for the Humanities. An agreement was reached with the National Assessment of Educational Progress to develop and ad- minister the test. The philosophical basis of the assess- ment is cultural literacy. NAHL was de- signed to test the background knowledge eleventh graders should possess and to elicit information on the cultural content offered and learned in American class- rooms. The authors quote E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and agree with his views on reading and background information as well as the importance of cultural content and tradi- tional lore in the curriculum. The process of developing the questions revealed dif- ferences in assessing knowledge of his- tory versus literature. The task force de- veloping history questions agreed on a common body of historical knowledge that all students should know. However, since there is no standard or authoritative curriculum for high school English, the lit- erature questiop.s were difficult to de- Recent Publications 283 velop; the literature task force could not assume that all students had read certain authors or works. Therefore the literature test assessed a number of different ele- ments: the curriculum (what is taught); student knowledge (what is retained); and inherited and popular culture. In the concluding chapter, .the authors make more than twenty specific recom- mendations to improve the teaching and learning of history and literature. The rec- ommendations are closely related to the preceding discussion of test results, so many seem obvious. For example, it is rec- ommended that (1) a coherent literature curriculum be developetl for all grades through high school, and that (2) more time be devoted to teaching literature in all grades. Although few of the recommen- dations are innovative, they are solid, well argued, consistent with the recommenda- tions of other reform reports, and likely to be supported by educators prominent in the movement. THE EDUCATION OF A TEACHER Howard Wolf's collection of essays spans his long career as a college English professor, spent primarily at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The es- says reveal a man who has a unique sense of history and the ability to discern and an- alyze new social and political trends at their outset. Wolf gives lively and vivid ac- counts of his teaching experiences, skill- fully relating them to current social, politi- cal, and cultural events. In his essays covering the cold war, the Vietnam War and student activism, the human poten- tial movement, and the current climate of student careerism, he explores the con- nections between higher education and American culture. He shares with Bloom and Hirsch an in- terest in the debate over content versus process in the classroom: As I have tried to make sense of my own teach- ing experience, it has become clear to me that most teachers and students either uphold con- tent and cognition at the expense of interper- sonal and intrapsychic dynamics, or they pro- mote the expressive implications of humanistic psychology at the expense of rationality (p.64). Although Wolf acknowledges a commit- 284 College & Research Libraries ment to what is taught (content), he speaks on behalf of process. The most in- teresting and provocative essays are those describing the use of encounter group techniques to teach literature. Writing in 1969, Wolf describes the rather radical evolution of a new course he developed . called "Literature of Mental Crisis and Madness." The twenty-five students re- sponded with hostility to the readings that included Freud, Jung, and Dostoevsky. They suggested abandoning the readings and analyzing the personal crises of class members instead. Wolf agreed to this and allowed the class to meet several times in a student's apartment instead of the as- signed classroom. Wolf concluded that, although the group had successfully built feelings of trust and closeness, it was not possible to teach a traditional course and at the same time respond to the develop- mental needs of students. Traditional courses are closed systems with a begin- ning and an end. However, Wolf does be- lieve that teachers have the power to alter the vision of a class from being frag- mented and course-conscious to being open to experience and self-discovery. Wolf's philosophy of teaching is essen- tially developmental; he encourages stu- dents to be expressive, imaginative, and to mtegrate thought and feeling. His ap- proach to teaching has been influenced by the human potential movement and psy- choanalytic theory. He has a strong inter- est in analyzing the interpersonal and af- fective dimension of the classroom, which he views as ''a laboratory for human de- velopment" (p.74). Wolf'scommitmentto the developmental theory is contrary to the conclusions reached in Cultural Liter- acy; Hirsch criticizes it for not recognizing the importance of transmitting to students specific cultural information. Wolf's teaching philosophy is grounded in the 1960s, when he believes significant May 1988 gains were made on personal, social, and political fronts. During that decade, Wolf experimented and took risks, enriching his teaching by borrowing from other dis- ciplines. He developed new courses on unusual topics (mental crisis and mad- ness) and sometimes substituted student journals and essays for the assigned litera- ture readings. In his evolution as a teacher, the sixties and early seventies ap- pear to have been a creative and produc- tive period. . In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom also devotes a chapter to the trans- formation of education in the sixties, viewing this period as a disaster for uni- versities, largely because curriculum re- quirements were dropped and the whole idea of a core curriculum was abandoned. According to Bloom, the resulting elective curriculum was very weak on substantive content, and there was no longer any stan- dard for what knowledge constitutes a university education. Although Bloom's views are conserva- tive and Wolf's are liberal, their works can ·be compared through their many common elements, including the university set- ting, the period covered (1950-80), and the interwoven themes of education, poli- tics, and culture. On specific issues, they are often diametrically opposed. Wolf looks with wonder at the educational transformation in universities in the six- ties. However, for Bloom this period was characterized by self-indulgent teaching and learning, when students were not held to rigorous studies in philosophy, history, and literature. In conclusion, both authors engage the reader by demonstrat- ing their commitment to teaching and in- volvement with their students. Both au- thors also describe the university in its social and political context, as an institu- tion that mirrors contemporary culture.