The Core Knowledge Blog

It’s 1987 all over again! Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason has come out of nowhere to become a top ten bestseller on Amazon. Her message, that there are deadly and destructive consequences to ignorance, has clearly struck a chord.

In an interview with PBS lion Bill Moyers, Jacoby is unsparing in her criticism of America’s schools. “When one out of every five Americans still believes that the sun revolves around the earth [there's a problem]….You shouldn’t have to be an intellectual or a college graduate to know that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth,” she tells Moyers.

Perhaps Jacoby hasn’t heard that content knowledge is mere data, and that critical thinking and problem solving are How We Learn Now. Jacoby points out what ought to be obvious—you can’t divorce content knowledge from understanding and critical thinking. “People getting out of high school should know how many Supreme Court justices there are. Most Americans don’t. Well, now this feeds back into our current political process,” says Jacoby. “If you don’t know that there are nine judges then you don’t know that George W. Bush’s last two judicial appointments, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, have put us one vote away from having a Supreme Court which really believes that religion should have a much more active role in public life, that’s likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you have to know there are nine justices before you know that we’re up to a five out of nine sure votes.”

She also sounds a theme that will ring familiar to Core Knowledge adherents. “I think that schools over the last 40 years instead of just adding things, for example—African-American history, women’s history, these are all great additions, and necessary—they really have placed less emphasis on the overall culture– cultural things that everybody should know,” says Jacoby.