Jeremiah Reedy, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where he taught for thirty-four years. He and a friend founded a Core Knowledge charter school in 1996 and he is preparing to open his second next year.

A Classics Professor's Love Affair with Core Knowledge

by Jeremiah Reedy, Ph.D

I finished my Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Michigan in 1968 and started my first real job at a liberal arts college the same year. As at most colleges in those days, all students were required to take freshman composition, two years of a foreign language, a history course, two courses in social sciences, and two courses in math and/or science, plus physical education. There was also a required course in religion. The radical student movement, which began at Berkeley in 1964, arrived in the Midwest in 1968. Radicalized students formed coalitions with young, radical professors, and students were elected to committees and began attending faculty meetings, which had previously been closed to all but members of the faculty and administration. Before long we were experiencing sit-ins, marches, protests, the occupation of the administration building, and “non-negotiable demands.” Among the demands was the abolition of all required courses. The faculty capitulated, and the college became an “open school.” The president called it “the individualization of learning.” Basically, we redefined liberal arts education as “doing your own thing” for four years, and soon, courses on soap operas, Batman and Superman, igloo building, etc., began to appear, especially during the one-month January term. To justify these novel courses, the faculty redefined the goals of liberal arts education in terms of skills — critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, analysis, synthesis, etc. A few of us objected to all these changes, but we were definitely in the minority. As time went on, we became the “loyal opposition.”

It was not until 1987, when Professor Hirsch's Cultural Literacy was published, that I learned that what had happened at our college and other institutions of higher learning had also happened in K–12 education, and the result was what Hirsch called “educational formalism.” We were all making the same mistake. I saw immediately that Hirsch had not only identified the problem, but had found a solution. The problem was that educators could not agree on the content of education and had said in effect, “We no longer know what students should learn, but it doesn’t matter; let them study anything they want to study as long as they are acquiring the desired skills.” Hirsch showed that such skills-based instruction, or educational formalism, does not work, especially with regard to reading. He then assumed that high-school students should be able to read newspapers, news magazines, and books addressed to the general public, certainly a reasonable expectation after thirteen years of education. Next he argued that this is impossible without the background knowledge that writers in our culture assume readers have. Analysis of newspapers and similar publications produced the famous (and at that time infamous) list of five thousand items that literate Americans know and that anyone who wants to be literate should learn.

In 1988 I had a short article published in the Classical Journal entitled “Cultural Literacy and the Classics,” in which I made the point that Hirsch had shown empirically that knowledge of classical antiquity was still necessary to be literate, since 263 of the five thousand items dealt with the ancient Mediterranean world. This provided some much-needed ammunition at a time when high-school Latin programs and college and university classics departments were under fire for not being “relevant” and other alleged shortcomings.

From the time I first taught as a teaching fellow in 1960, the field of Classics had been under attack. First it was the progressive educationists who claimed that Latin and Greek had a merely ornamental value and that there was no longer a need for a Classics department. Next came the radical student movement and the hippie generation whose battle cry on campus was “relevance.” What, they asked, could be more irrelevant than dead languages? When radical feminism and postmodernism became fashionable, we were accused of ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism and were criticized for teaching only works written by DWEMs (dead white European males). Since being told constantly that our courses were a waste of time and money and that the department should be abolished could get a person “down,” I decided to try enjoying the controversies. Thus I gradually came to think of myself as a polemicist and controversialist. (Debate and rational argumentation are, of course, an integral part of the Classical tradition.) Meeting the opposition head-on worked, and, borrowing an idea from Gerald Graff, who recommended “Teaching the Conflicts,” I developed a course called “Contemporary Controversies,” which I offered several times during the January “Interim Term.” Discussion of Hirsch's Cultural Literacy was always a high point in the course. Each session began with a diagnostic “Cultural Literacy” quiz. I remember well one student who wasn’t testing to his expectations who said he felt like suing his high school. Meanwhile, I began receiving invitations to speak on cultural literacy in various Philosophy of Education courses where I was “Exhibit A” in the section on “essentialism.”

As a self-appointed educational reformer, I joined various organizations that were promoting choice in education, i.e., charter schools and vouchers. In 1995, a friend I had made in one of these groups asked me if I would be interested in helping him found a K-8 charter school. I replied immediately, “Yes! — on condition that it be a Core Knowledge school.” He had not heard of CK, so I recommended Cultural Literacy. After reading it, he called me and said, “That’s the kind of curriculum we want.” Hence we began the two-year-long process of founding a school, and it opened in St. Paul in 1997 with grades K-5 under the name “The New Spirit School.” Today, it is a flourishing school with 307 students in K-8. Ninety-five percent of the students are eligible for free lunches; about 65 percent are Hmong, and most of the rest are African American and Hispanic, with very few Caucasians. None of the teachers or the administrators we hired had had any experience with Core Knowledge, but all became enthusiastic supporters of it after attending faculty development sessions, reading Hirsch’s books, going to national conferences, and teaching it. To my knowledge, we have not had a single complaint from parents about the curriculum.

For many years I had been thinking that what higher education needed was a definition of college-level cultural literacy to complement Hirsch’s definition of high-school-level cultural literacy. This could be accomplished if we assumed that graduates of liberal arts colleges should be able to read publications such as Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and books addressed to the college-educated segment of the population. The goal would be to make explicit the background knowledge implicitly assumed by those who write for “highbrow” publications. Thus, in 2003, while on sabbatical leave, I developed a proposal that we subsequently sent to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project, which would have cost $198,000, involved hiring twenty graduate students to spend most of one summer analyzing these publications and noting on cards what the authors assumed readers knew. Their research would be checked by twenty-five subject-area specialists who might propose additions and/or deletions. The result, to be published in book form and placed online, would be a list of perhaps three thousand items that graduates of liberal arts colleges should know (over and above the five thousand items Hirsch had identified). The results of this project would be useful for designing core curricula, for planning Humanities courses and programs, for preparing Humanities teachers, for testing students at the beginning of their college career, and again at the time of graduation, and for numerous other purposes. Professor Hirsch endorsed the project wholeheartedly and very kindly provided a letter that was included in an appendix to the proposal. While almost all of the N.E.H. readers liked the idea, they did not vote to fund it, and unfortunately, the project never got off the ground, but I have not abandoned it completely.

I have attended conferences in Greece on Greek philosophy every summer since 1990, and in 2004 I attended the “First World Olympic Congress on Greek Philosophy” held on the island of Spetsis near Athens. My contribution to the congress was a thirty- minute paper on “E.D. Hirsch's Philosophy of Education,” delivered during a session on the philosophy of education. In my research for the paper, I relied heavily on The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, plus reviews of it and lectures and articles by Hirsch, as well as on Cultural Literacy. I predicted that, as other countries become multicultural, controversies regarding the content of education will develop, and Hirsch’s work will prove invaluable. I called Cultural Literacy one of the most important books on education to appear in a hundred years. I also predicted that Professor Hirsch would go down in history as one of our most influential educational theorists and reformers, in a class with Plato, Quintilian, Maria Montessori, and a handful of others. The paper was well received, and my criticism of so-called “progressive education” generated a good deal of discussion.

After retiring from teaching in August of 2004, I began to wonder what I should do with the rest of my life — having no desire to play golf and/or bingo or do square dancing in Arizona. I toyed with the idea of becoming a fundraiser; then I thought of purchasing a franchise and going into the tutoring business. Finally, I decided the best contribution I could make would be another Core Knowledge charter school. This one will supplement the CK curriculum with Latin in K-8 and Greek in 7 and 8. We are tentatively calling it “Richfield Classical Academy.” If all goes as planned, we will open with K-3 in the fall of 2006 and add one grade per year until we reach the eighth grade. My motives are the same as those ones for The New Spirit School, viz, to provide a superior education for a certain number of students who might otherwise not get it and to show to local communities, the state of Minnesota, and the nation that this is the best education for all students. Viva Core Knowledge!