by Bruce Bawer
Apropos of the article by William Damon lamenting the failure of schools to encourage identification with American culture and values, one reader protests that in New York City, anyway, “almost all of the social studies curriculum in grades 4, 7, and 8, and a quarter of the curriculum in grade 5, is focused entirely on the United States. Grades 9 and 10 do world history, and grade 11 returns to US history and government. Heavy emphases on US history and government appear elsewhere as well, e.g. in grade 12. A glance at reading lists immediately reveals a similar heavy emphasis on American authors and American themes.” The reader adds that the teaching of the Constitution is mandated by New York state law.
Another reader argues that
there is no unified “quest for liberty and equal rights” in American history, and to act like one exists without describing what you think that is seems disingenuous….I would argue that “American values” rest on the bedrock that there is no permanent American value from which the others flow….You seem to decry relativism, but isn’t that what America was always about; that different values and systems should be acknowledged and understood and not simply dismissed out-of-hand for being “Unamerican”?
By American values I mean those rooted in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights – values like freedom of speech, freedom of religion (including the freedom to have no religion or to leave a religion), equal rights, individual liberty, the right to “the pursuit of happiness,” the idea that government derives its power from the consent of the governed, etc. American history has been a gradual, sometimes bloody process of making America truer to these founding principles – for example, by freeing the slaves and instituting women’s suffrage. We haven’t moved in a clear, straight line, but the arc, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, has been toward justice. To affirm these founding principles, to be sure, is not to suggest that we are always true to them or are necessarily being terribly true to them at the moment. The reason why it is important for young Americans to know about, and be animated by, these principles is that we want them to grow up to shape a country that is truer to those principles than it is now.
Another reader is concerned that
in the rush to improve test scores in the “basics” of math, science and English, the basics of living aren’t being taught. So you have high school graduates with decent overall grades who can’t budget their money or live healthily, have no idea of how to parent or do their taxes, know embarrassingly little about ethics and morality, their country or political system, et cetera. They’re supposed to learn this stuff at home….. When these subjects are breached in school, they’re usually in a flat, dull way. Someone with passion needs to be telling the kids “Hey, this stuff is important!” Ultimately these supposedly peripheral subjects will have a greater effect on most people’s lives than whether they can do algebra or conjugate verbs.
And yet another reader notes that
there is a significant distinction to be made between learning to rattle off the bullet points of the American political system (separation of powers, independent judiciary, bill of rights, etc.) and learning about American culture. Yes, there are instances of overlap: one could view the mythos of the American West as an outgrowth of our ideological commitment to personal liberty. But a conversation about the salient elements of American culture, particularly contemporary American culture, resists easy pedagogical treatment. It's one thing to gloss over a few traditional celebrations and view a little folk art from Latin America and elsewhere (which is generally what we're talking about in the States when we're talking about multicultural education), but it's something else entirely to parse the multifarious cultural landscape of the United States and come away with a coherent vision of what this place is really about. For many students, especially those who come from impoverished neighborhoods, who may have witnessed acts of violence perpetrated both by and against their peers, who have a negative view of the police, etc. – a broadly American sense of culture may mean little to them. In this case, the matter is not whether the material is being taught, but whether the cognitive dissonance between that material and the reality that such students witness on a day to day basis can be endured long enough for those students to regurgitate the proper answers on a standardized exam.
The Dish 