ENTER THE CRITICAL THINKING MOVEMENT

During the 1980s there was a constant drumbeat of criticism of the educational process from such persons as Secretary of Education William Bennett, his assistant Chester Finn, and the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney. Bennett even came to office vowing to preside over the demolition of the very department he headed, so deplorable did he consider its activities.

These were not, of course, voices from the left crying out against social and economic injustice. They were conservatives critical of existing institutions – a rather different breed from the usual run of conservatives. One might even speak of them as educational fundamentalists.

Their complaint, in a nutshell, was that Americans were poorly served by the educational system, because those emerging from the system knew little, or nothing worth knowing. Consequently, they concluded, the entire system of schooling was in crisis.

The response of those in the lower echelons of education – teachers and administrators alike – was to draw up their wagons in a circle and exchange volley for volley with their attackers. They ridiculed the naive lists of items that every educated person should know (as drawn up by E. D. Hirsch of cultural literacy fame) and cited mountains of educational research in defense of what they were doing.