Beyond Multicultural Illiteracy

One of the most hotly contested issues on America's college campuses today is the preservation of Western civilization in the minds of students via the infusion of the literature and history of Ancient Greece and Rome and western Europe. As two best-selling books, Cultural Literacy (Hirsch, 1987) and The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom, 1987) contend, America's youth are out of touch with this cultural heritage. Both Hirsch and Bloom raise this point without acknowledging the decidedly ethnocentric view of traditional Western civilization. Their works sparked a heated debate in 1988 on the campus of Stanford University which resulted in that university's faculty senate approving a Culture and Values core curriculum that included works from non-White and female authors. The controversy was further heightened when then-Secretary of Education William Bennett traveled to Stanford to denounce this curriculum decision himself. The Western civilization controversy at Stanford is emblematic of the wars being waged throughout the country on several fronts. For example, a group calling itself the National Association of Scholars carried a full-page advertisement in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 8, 1989, p. A-23) which urged no retreat from the sacred canon; yet, using recent results of history and literature tests from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Ravitch and Finn (1987) underscore how little of the classical Eurocentric canon America's 17year-olds actually know. The state of California's history/social science curriculum framework (whose principal author was Ravitch) was lauded as an excellent example of the grand narrative of history to which all students should have access (Alexander & Crabtree, 1988), while a New York State Department of Education report calling for a Curriculum of Inclusion was denounced by defenders of the Eurocentric canon for bowing to the of Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities (Leo, 1989). Purportedly, all this fighting over the curriculum is a reaction to the fragmented, cafeteria-style curriculum that emerged during the 1960s as a result of civil rights, antiwar, and women's rights advocates' demands for a more relevant and representative education. The conservative argument alleges that these special interests groups, with their ethnic studies and women's studies course requirements, have pulled the curriculum in so many directions that for two decades American students somehow