Citizens of a good polis:

...The truth is that the curriculum found in the average American public high school is not that far off Bennett's mark...

...I don't know whether it is Buckley's influence, but, despite the incompatibility between cultural conservatism and economic conservatism, the Republican party, long the natural home of economic conservatives, has become increasingly hospitable to cultural conservatives...

...Hirsch's best-seller, Cultural Literacy...

...Neither MTV nor the typical American household is much concerned about the fall of ancient Rome or the rise of modern science...

...This was the time, around 1970, when the educational left entered into an alliance with students who didn't feel like studying very hard, and together they inscribed "relevance" on their banners...

...CITIZENS OF A GOOD POLIS THE PROPER CURRICULUM I have always found it ironic, hence amusing, that the theme song for William Buckley's TV program, "Firing Line," is an excerpt from Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos.'' I suppose this is Buckley's way of making the point that conservatives are attached to tried and true values, of which Bach is simply an example...

...Smith's book was the dawn of a new culture, the Enlightenment, which was downright hostile to the old culture of Christendom...

...This curriculum would require, among other things, three years of math and four years of literature for high school students - not just for those who are college-bound, but for all secondary students...

...In other words, it is society as a whole that educates, and it is the culture of society itself that constitutes the curriculum...

...But in Reagan's cabinet there is at least one person who counts as a genuine cultural conservative: William Bennett, the Secretary of Education, who recently published "James Madison High School," a booklet proposing "a model high school curriculum...

...For while professional teachers will be trying to pull students in the direction of literary, scientific, and historical knowledge, the students will be pulled in the opposite direction by the world around them...

...that Buckley is both at the same time is simply an eccentric tour de force, not a model that the world can follow...

...In other words, one can be an economic conservative or a cultural conservative...

...And what are a few teachers and their high-toned curriculum among so many...

...This first became evident in the heyday of Vice-president Spiro Agnew...

...Bach's music was the last sunburst of vanishing culture, the ancient culture of West European Christendom, which, though it had been in the process of disintegration for several centuries, still clung to life in the first half of the eighteenth century...

...Children get educated by schools, yes, but also by TV, movies, records, churches, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Y, etc., and above all by their families and peer groups...

...Despite paying lip-service to the concept that there are important agencies of education in the world besides schools, education reformers, when they come down to cases, rarely speak about reforming anything but schooling...

...The problem is that in America, public policy-makers have no handle on education except the handle provided for them by schools...

...I don't know if Mike Deaver, Ed Meese, Lynn Nofziger, John Poindexter, and Ollie North qualify as cultural conservatives, though some of them at least might profit from reflecting on the great Miltonic theme of temptation...

...As a speculative exercise, Bennett's model curriculum is very attractive...

...Of all the components of American education, the one that perhaps needs the least improvement is the high school curriculum...

...Make him the citizen of a good polis," he was told...

...Further, his notion that all students should follow the same core curriculum has great appeal to anyone who believes that equality of educational opportunity involves, not merely equal access to school buildings, but equal access to the intellectual goods distributed in those buildings...

...we'll have to improve the "curriculum" offered by all those other education agencies as well...

...The premise of Bennett's essay is that there are certain things every civilized American ought to know...

...The ancient Greeks understood this sort of thing better than we do...

...Getting rid of this false belief is the first step toward genuine improvement in American education.erican education...

...But they are most definitely not the same thing...

...The secretary of education, like virtually every other reformer on today's educational landscape, greatly overrates the importance of schooling...

...The trouble is, of course, that one can be the kind of conservative who loves Bach and all that he symbolizes, or one can be the kind of conservative who loves Adam Smith and all that he symbolizes...

...But as a method for getting Americans to know what they ought to know, Bennett's scheme is not likely to work...

...In fact, this premise, namely, that there is in principle a canonical list of items that everyone ought to know, is what differentiates cultural conservatives from their rivals...

...The foe of relevance and the friend of traditional educational values, Agnew, in those intervals of free time when he wasn't receiving envelopes stuffed with cash, would give homilies affirming the need for our young people to study (of all things...

...But after we have improved the daylights out of it, our condition won't be a whole lot better than when we started out...

...and the president himself is waiting, I understand, for the Reader's Digest version of Paradise Lost...

...Milton's poetry...

...This premise also lies at the foundation of "American Memory,'' by Lynne Cheney, who heads the National Endowment for the Humanities, and of E.D...

...They liked to tell the story of the man who asked how to obtain a good education for his son...

...So they first deceive themselves and then everyone else into believing that this handle is sufficient...

...For all practical purposes, they talk and write as though schooling and education were the same thing...

...but one can hardly be both kinds at the same time...

...Bach's career ended (1750) a generation before Smith published Wealth of Nations, a revolutionary book that appeared, appropriately enough, the same year as the American Declaration of Independence...

...If we are serious about reforming education, it will not be enough to improve the school curriculum...