When I started working on my dissertation in 1990, I focused on invocations of “the people” in the rhetoric of educational reform. This work was an extension of the thinking I had begun in my master’s thesis on E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. Hirsch’s diagnosis of the source of our social ills was that people today no longer shared cultural reference points, as they had back in the day. And Hirsch’s list of terms people today needed to know provided a solution to the problem so defined. Hirsch’s list attracted a lot of attention, much of it criticism of the list’s implicit biases, evident both in the list’s inclusions and its exclusions. Hirsch, undaunted by his critics, moved on to the business of marketing cultural literacy curricula in the public schools and grade-appropriate lists for anxious parents. His success was impossible to ignore: all the criticism of his list, including my thesis in its small way, had only served to enhance Hirsch’s central premise that literacy was about list mastery—if not his list, then some other, more inclusive, less-biased list. The different fates of Hirsch’s writing and my own thesis eventually led me to think about the dialectical relationship between the business of educational reform, which generates marketable products, and the business of critique, which generates degrees and other forms of cultural capital.
In my dissertation, I found a way to think about this relationship by taking up the question, “What if ‘the people’ are defined as the problem?” As the Culture Wars raged on and the first invasion of Iraq commenced, I’d preoccupied by the fact that anything and everything could be ascribed to “the people”—what they needed, what they lacked, what they wanted, what they knew, what they had been like before X moment in time, what they feared, what they supported. The dissertation allowed me to explore how different definitions of who “the people” were and what they needed shaped the educations they were offered.
I was determined not to repeat the mistake I made in my thesis; indeed, in an early (insane) draft of my dissertation proposal, one of the ten projected chapters was to have been a look at how Hirsch’s ideas had been adopted and adapted in K-12 education. Fortunately, Dave Bartholomae, who directed my dissertation, knew that the best dissertation is a finished dissertation and advised me to rein in my ambitions, so Hirsch (and William Bennett) ended up on the cutting room floor, as I narrowed my focus to reform efforts shaping higher education. And then, when I was revising my dissertation, “Representing the People,” into the manuscript that became As If Learning Mattered, I could see that I hadn’t really escaped the allure of critique and had, as a result, missed what I was learning first-hand as a junior faculty member in the Writing Program at Rutgers University: the business of training teachers is unruly, difficult, and never-ending. I had no trouble critiquing the writing program I myself was part of, but the fact was that the program existed because of the university-wide requirement that students take first-year writing. Everyone and everyone anyone ever knew could critique the first-year course, but no English professor and nobody anybody ever knew who was an English professor (I exaggerate, but only slightly) ever wanted to run the program that was responsible for staffing the first-year writing course. Enter the central figure in As If Learning Mattered—the intellectual-bureaucrat.
Critique is the easy part. I think that conceptual bitter pill is no easier to swallow today than it was twenty-five years ago. Indeed, reading As If Learning Mattered for the first time in a very, very long time in preparation for writing these framing remarks, I was struck by how many times in my career I’ve fallen prey to the belief that arguments about curricular reform will be decided on their intellectual merits alone and not on the basis of what least discomfits the faculty and the administration. But rereading the book also reminded me of how important it continues to be to commit to the impure business of working within the systems that exist. For the battle over what can and should be known by students in the U.S. educational system is now at a fever pitch, with book bans and word bans (“Don’t Say Gay!”) and alternate facts and alternate histories (under Florida’s new social studies curriculum, the slave trade is to be presented as having had an ersatz job training component that allowed enslaved people to acquire skills of “personal benefit” ) having become commonplace occurrences in K-12. If the past twenty-five years have taught me anything, it is that no culture war is ever won finally and completely. Defeat is only held at bay by an understanding that all reform efforts, all of them, create reaction-formations that work to cause the reform efforts to fail. For all of us who felt that the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Act, and Roe v. Wade settled certain cultural matters once and for all, acknowledging the fact that the work of reform is never done and that no advances are irreversible has been debilitating and demoralizing. The stakes are too high, though, to cede the ground to those who wish to return us to some unspecified time in the past when things were better. The names of the players in the culture wars have changed over the past twenty-five years, but the dynamic explored in As If Learning Mattered remains the same: theory and practice always come into conflict and in that space of conflict resides the hope and the promise for change.
‒ REM 2023