If it’s “natural” it’s got to be better, right?

Across from the magazine offices, there’s a sprawling, high-end supermarket that’s convinced many of us nearby office workers of that fact. And, whether it’s true or not, I can definitely tell you this: If it’s natural, it’s got to be more expensive.

It’s one thing to waste your hard-earned money on natural pretzels and gluten-free cookies. (Bottom line: Not going to hurt you -- at least physically.) But what of the “natural” education we are foisting on our kids? That’s the question E.D. Hirsch asks in his new book, The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap in American Children, a portion of which is excerpted in the spring issue of Policy Perspectives

Didn’t consider yourself a natural education lover? Well, if your schools are like most in America, you are, unwittingly or not. You see, Hirsch says our current approach to reading dates back to the early 19th century Romantics and their notion that academic learning should be as “natural” as learning to sit up or walk. This idea, coupled with an anti-intellectual bias against the accumulation of mere “facts,” has resulted in deadening reading classes where students are supposed to employ reading strategies -- “predicting, summarizing, questioning, clarifying”-- without being exposed to the requisite factual knowledge that would help them truly understand (and maybe, even, love to read).

I strongly agree with Hirsch’s analysis (or, at least, 98 percent of it). His ground-breaking book Cultural Literacy came out in 1987, in the midst of the culture wars, and was misinterpreted -- and, perhaps, appropriated by some conservatives -- to espouse an elitist education that reinforced America’s dominant, white male culture over the voices of minorities and the disenfranchised.

But I’m with Hirsch here. Better to gain a thorough grounding of one culture’s intellectual traditions -- even if it is the so-called hegemonic European one -- than to be offered a smorgasbord of disconnected texts from all over. (That’s not to say, of course, that students shouldn’t read book from other cultures as well.)

Hirsch, by the way, insists that he is not advocating an accumulation of disconnected facts. However, I believe his position has been sadly misinterpreted by some state education departments (in their fact-laden exams) and publishers (in their “mile-wide-and-inch-deep” science and history texts). Of course, Hirsch’s argument wasn’t helped by “The List” he included at the end of the book, which is sure fun to read but tends to reinforce that notion.

I saw the worst of both worlds a few years back when I was trying to tutor an eighth-grader in history. It was sad because he obviously didn’t have the comprehension skills to grasp a paragraph on the origins of World War II. And the text itself didn’t help, being hopelessly cluttered with facts like the 1939-41 Pan American mutual defense pact.

I’m not even sure my student knew who the Nazis were. And no amount of predicting, summarizing, questioning, or clarifying was going to help.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor