President Donald Trump signed an executive order recently calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education (ED), a process that will still require an act of Congress, leaving his critics aghast and hyperbolically claiming that he is trying to end education itself in America. In fact, he is trying to rescue it.

“The experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the order reads.

Indeed it has. The White House noted that ED has spent over $3 trillion since the Department’s creation in 1979, with “virtually no measurable improvement in student achievement.” The Nation’s Report Card revealed that 6-in-10 fourth graders and nearly 75% of eighth graders are not proficient in math; 7-in-10 fourth and eighth graders lack reading proficiency; and 40% of fourth grade students don’t even meet basic reading levels. Standardized test scores have remained flat for decades, and in math, U.S. students rank 28th out of 37 member-countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The decline of American education isn’t entirely the fault of a bloated federal bureaucracy, however, or even of the ideological capture of our educational institutions. Arguably more damaging is the culture of techno-distraction since at least the 1960s, culminating today in the ubiquity of smartphones among even young schoolchildren. Experts have warned for decades of the mentally debilitating effects of the aptly-named “boob tube,” but the addictive, bottomless pit of internet scrolling and social media obsession makes complaints of “too much TV” seem quaint.

A schoolteacher posted a TikTok video recently describing her disheartening experience with the state of public education. She laments that students “live on their phones” which feed them a “constant stream of dopamine” from morning to night. In class, without their phones they are like addicts suffering withdrawal – “vacant,” unable to focus unless the teacher conveys information “packaged in short little clips.” Their eyes are open, she says, but “they’re not there, and they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before.” It’s as if “you are interacting with them briefly in between hits of the internet, which is their real life.”

As a teacher of teens in a homeschooling community, I can vouch for the impact this culture of distraction has even on homeschooled kids, who tend to be less swept up in pop culture than their public school peers. But perhaps even more concerning than their attention deficit is their deficit of “cultural literacy” – a term coined by educator E. D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the influential 1988 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

“To be culturally literate,” Hirsch wrote, “is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science.”

In his book, Hirsch compiled a list of over 5,000 notable names both fictional (Iago) and real (Houdini), places both fictional (Valhalla) and real (Waterloo), scientific terms (absolute zero), titles of books (“Pride and Prejudice”) and works of art (the Sistine Chapel), history-making battles (Valley Forge), common phrases (fiddling while Rome burns) and maxims (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), and much more, which he argued every American should know.

“Only by accumulating shared symbols, and the shared information that the symbols represent, can we learn to communicate effectively with one another in our national community,” Hirsch wrote.

With the rise of a culture of mass entertainment from the mid-20th century on, our children’s familiarity with such shared symbols and information began to unravel. Centuries-old touchstones like the Bible, Shakespeare, and other cultural icons began to be replaced by TV shows and pop stars, and then eventually by “memes” which, while entertaining, are by their very nature ephemeral and tied to specific cultural moments. Ten years from now, or even five, it is likely that none of today’s memes will be recognizable; they certainly will not have the same meaningful depth to connect us as the items listed in Hirsch’s book.

As our cultural literacy declines, so does our cultural unity. Having failed to ground our children’s minds in what the English poet Matthew Arnold called  “the best which has been thought and said” in our civilization, we have deprived them of any connection to that grand legacy – indeed, they have little if any connection to the past at all. Man-on-the-street videos abound in which young people, even adults, cannot answer basic questions about history such as who fought in the Civil War, or in which century the Declaration of Independence was signed. Younger generations now live in the eternal present of pop culture, focused only on the now, the new, and the what’s next.

I ask my students why they should even bother to read great books or learn history, and they dutifully offer the standard reasons such as, “It opens your mind,” it “increases your attention span,” and “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”

These are valid reasons, and I add that being able to position themselves in the great sweep of history and to appreciate the great achievements of their cultural heritage draws them closer to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. It enlarges one’s soul and binds us in our common humanity. That’s not a message one gets very often from pop culture.

Then I hit them with an important reason of which none of them ever think: young people who do not read books or know their history will one day become more easily manipulated and lied to by demagogues. They will be more easily drawn into the web of totalitarians who understand that severing young people from their cultural legacy leaves them intellectually, morally and spiritually unfortified to resist. “Take away a nation’s heritage and they are more easily persuaded,” wrote The Communist Manifesto co-author Karl Marx. “Keep people from their history and they are more easily controlled.”

With the current education debate we have an opportunity not just to jettison a bureaucracy and an ideological agenda that have failed our children; we have a moment to revive a focus on the cultural literacy connecting each new generation to our civilization’s grand, unifying heritage, one that will bequeath to them the wisdom and humility, the beauty and morality, and the aspiration and purpose they need to flourish.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Flickr-Phil Roeder, CC BY 2.0