Within the span of 10 days, Robert Pondiscio notes, opinion pieces in The Atlantic and The New York Times did something remarkable that would have been hard to imagine even a few months ago:
They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits.
In his Times op-ed, veteran journalist James Traub writes that Texas is right to insist that students encounter a common body of important texts, including the Bible. Invoking E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s work on cultural literacy, he notes that we become good readers “by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information that allow us to make sense of a text.” He praises Texas for moving away from a skills-based, content-neutral approach to reading instruction.
Similarly, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch’s essay for The Atlantic argues that “for a high school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.” He points out, for example, the value of the Psalms for understanding Lincoln’s speeches or the Book of Jonah for reading Moby-Dick.
[…]
When you’re no longer confident that schools are producing capable readers at all, old arguments about what children should read—and how they should be taught to read—begin to sound different. If you’re honest and fair, you become open to other ideas.