After completing the weekly readings, provide a thorough response in your own words to the weekly questions posted below. Please make sure you submit a one-word docume

CHAPTER 2

TEXTUAL AUTHORITY,
CULTURE, AND THE

POLITICS OF LITERACY

Since the second term of the Reagan administration, the debate on edu­
cation has taken a new turn. Now, as before, the tone is principally set
by ~he _right, but i~s position has been radically altered. The importance
of linking educational reform to the needs of big business has contin­
ued to influence the debate, while demands that schools provide the
ski lls necessary for domestic production and expanding capital abroad
have slowly given way to an overriding emphasis on schools as sites of
cultural production. The emphasis on cultural production can be seen
in current attempts to address the issue of cu ltural literacy, in the de­
velopment of national cu rriculum boards, and in reform initiatives
bent on providing students with the language, knowledge, and values
necessary to preserve the essential traditions of Western civilization.1

The right’s position on cultural production in the schools arises from a
consensus that t he problems faced by the United States can no longer
be reduced to those of educat ing students in the skills they will need to
occupy jobs in more advanced and middle-range occupational levels in
such areas as computer programming, financial analysis, and elec­
tronic machine repair.2 Instead, the emphasis must be switched to the
current cultural crisis, which can be traced to the b roader ideological
tenets of the progressive education movement that dominated the cur­
riculum after the Second World War. These include the pernicious doc­
trine of cultu ral relativism, according to which canonical texts of 1hc
Western intellectual tradition may not lw lwld superior to olhN’>; 1lw

.l·I

THE POLITICS OF LITERACY D 25

notion that student experience should qualify as a viable form of
knowledge; and the idea that ethnic, racial, gender, and other rela­
tions play a significant role in accounting for the development and in­
fluence of mainstream intellectual culture. On this account , the 1960s
proved disastrous to the preservation of the inherited virtues of West­
ern culture. Relativism systematically downgraded the value of key lit­
erary and philosophical traditions, giving equal weight to the dominant
knowledge of the “Great Books” and to an emergent potpourri of “de­
graded” cultu ral attitudes. Allegedly, the last twenty years have w it­
nessed the virtual loss of those revered traditions that constitute the
core of the Western heritage. The unfortunate legacy that has emerged
has resulted in a generation of cultural illiterates. In this view, not only
the American economy but civilization itself is at risk.

Allan Bloom (1987) and E. D. Hirsch (1987) represent different ver­
sions of the latest and most popular conservative thrust for educational
rt•form. Each, in his own way, represents a frontal attack aimed at pro­