Andrew Hartman

A Trojan Horse for Social Engineering: The Curriculum Wars in Recent American History

Ever since the nation’s founding, Americans have wrestled with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s famous 1782 riddle: “What then is the American, this new man?” Rare is the historical moment when any one answer to that seemingly straightforward question has satisfied a broad consensus. In fact, intense struggles over efforts to define a normative American identity have long marked cultural politics in the United States. More to the point, Americans have always fought the so-called culture wars, a term of recent vintage that signifi es the angry, oft en politically consequential clashes over moral conduct and, indeed, over the meaning of Americanism itself. And, for as long as Americans have fought the culture wars, they have debated the role of education, the institution most essential to ensuring the reproduction of national identity. The school curriculum has particularly been the object of bitter recriminations, since it conveys, in the words of sociologist James Davison Hunter, “powerful symbols about the meaning of American life—the character of its past, the challenges of the present, and its future agenda.” Walter Lippmann put it even more succinctly in American Inquisitors , his scathing indictment of 1920s curriculum vigilantes: “It is in the school that the child is drawn towards or drawn away from the religion and the patriotism of its parents.” 1

Up from the Sixties

Reactions to the political disorderliness of the Sixties were often quite dramatic. In response to the violent repression of protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society formed the infamous Weathermen, an underground revolutionary cell ultimately responsible for exploding several small bombs, including at the Pentagon. At the other end of the power spectrum, the Nixon White House countered high-profile leaks of classified information by setting up a clandestine special investigation unit, the notorious “plumbers” who, among other illegal activities, broke into and wiretapped Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Intellectual responses to Sixties ferment were no less striking. This is made clear by new biographies of Christopher Lasch (1932–94) and Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930), two of the most renowned figures in recent U.S. intellectual history. Lasch’s and Podhoretz’ stunning political reorientations help us make sense of the post-Sixties fractures that still characterize contemporary American social thought. Christopher Lasch grew up in the Midwest and was raised by highly educated secular liberals. Norman Podhoretz grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and was raised by working-class Jewish immigrants. But despite such divergent beginnings, the intellectual biographies of Lasch and Podhoretz converge in remarkable fashion. Both studied at Columbia University, Lasch as a graduate student, Podhoretz as an undergraduate. They were mentored by world-famous scholars: Lasch, informally, by historian Richard Hofstadter; Podhoretz, intimately, by literary critic Lionel Trilling. And although Lasch never lived the life of a full-fledged member of “the family”—Murray Kempton’s apt signifier for that nepotistic and dysfunctional group otherwise known as the New York intellectuals—they both internalized the habits of mind that

Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy – By Richard D. Kahlenberg

After suffering the indignity of being lampooned in the Woody Allen film Sleeper as the man who blew up the world, no less, before being posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clint...

Christopher Lasch: Critic of liberalism, historian of its discontents

This article sketches the intellectual biography of irascible social critic and historian Christopher Lasch. Even though Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalisms discontents, his political commitments shifted rather dramatically during the course of his life (1932–1994). The essay argues that as Laschs commitments shifted – from being an outspoken leftist critic of Cold War liberalism to a self-styled populist moralist, denounced by feminists for his defense of the traditional family – so too did his historical approach, often in quite fruitful ways. Laschs intellectual trajectory serves as a canvas for theorizing about the inherently political nature of historical writing.