Civilization and Its Malcontents

The current crisis of education in the United States may legitimately be characterized as an attempt to politicize the curriculum itself. Those who have provoked it contend that the existing curriculum in the humanities is already politicized in virtue of the fact that its basic texts have been composed by Western white males and that, in consequence, the required courses are intrinsically infected with racism, sexism, and imperialism. The remedy proposed for this deplorable situation is that the traditional texts be partly replaced and supplemented by books composed by women and people of color and by representatives of the oppressed classes of the past and present, and, further, that the study of foreign cultures in depth be required. To ensure that these texts be properly taught, it is urged that additional personnel of instruction, wherever possible, be recruited from minorities and women, if there is any doubt about the willingness or capacity of existing faculties to do so.

This transformation or revision (call it what you will) has been carried out fully at Stanford University, and criticized in some educational circles as a politicizing of a curriculum designed for other purposes. Such criticism has provoked the rejoinder from the architects of the new curriculum that the criticism is itself politically oriented— indeed, an expression of the same repressive politics embodied in the canonic texts of the course in Western culture. Even before these developments, in a Report to Congress on The Humanities in America, Lynn Cheney, the present chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had deplored the fact that, in the teaching of the humanities on every level, “viewing humanities texts as though they were primarily political documents is the most noticeable trend in academic study of the humanities today. Truth and beauty and excellence are regarded as irrelevant, questions of aesthetic and intellectual quality dismissed.” Her report has been subjected to strong criticism by a committee of the American Council of Learned Societies as itself a political document.

SH

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Sidney Hook

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The current crisis of education in the United States may legitimately be characterized as an attempt to politicize the curriculum itself. Those who have provoked it contend that the existing curriculum in the humanities is already politicized in virtue of the fact that its basic texts have been composed by Western white males and that, in consequence, the required courses are intrinsically infected with racism, sexism, and imperialism. The remedy proposed for this deplorable situation is that the traditional texts be partly replaced and supplemented by books composed by women and people of color and by representatives of the oppressed classes of the past and present, and, further, that the study of foreign cultures in depth be required. To ensure that these texts be properly taught, it is urged that additional personnel of instruction, wherever possible, be recruited from minorities and women, if there is any doubt about the willingness or capacity of existing faculties to do so.

This transformation or revision (call it what you will) has been carried out fully at Stanford University, and criticized in some educational circles as a politicizing of a curriculum designed for other purposes. Such criticism has provoked the rejoinder from the architects of the new curriculum that the criticism is itself politically oriented— indeed, an expression of the same repressive politics embodied in the canonic texts of the course in Western culture. Even before these developments, in a Report to Congress on The Humanities in America, Lynn Cheney, the present chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had deplored the fact that, in the teaching of the humanities on every level, “viewing humanities texts as though they were primarily political documents is the most noticeable trend in academic study of the humanities today. Truth and beauty and excellence are regarded as irrelevant, questions of aesthetic and intellectual quality dismissed.” Her report has been subjected to strong criticism by a committee of the American Council of Learned Societies as itself a political document.