‘The effect of Dewey’s philosophy on the design of curricular systems was devastating,” Richard Hofstadter wrote over 50 years ago in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow have edited a superb collection of essays on different aspects of American culture and life that extends, deepens, and updates Hofstadter’s critique of the naïve and feckless naturalism of John Dewey that now pervades and eviscerates our culture.
The editors rightly give pride of place in their volume to a lead essay by the literary theorist and educational reformer E. D. Hirsch Jr., of the University of Virginia, one of the most distinguished scholars and thinkers in the past half century. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation (1967) remains a fundamental work in the defense of decent norms of rationality and interpretation that have been engulfed since then in the tide of French-Nietzschean irrationalism and know-nothing naturalism now so well established in our universities. Hirsch early caught the attention and approval of C. S. Lewis, who nevertheless predicted to him that his defense of objectivity would fail in the face of the onslaught of subjectivism, irrationalism, and neophilia. His prediction was prophetic.
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