Are Student Heads Full of Emptiness?

Allan What? and E.D. Who? Educators are bemused, booksellers astonished. No wonder. Two professor-authors, Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago and E.D. Hirsch Jr. of the University of Virginia, are leaders on the best-seller lists, even though their tomes would not seem the stuff of mass browsing in the summer sun.

Yet there they are. Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, with the daunting subtitle How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, has 250,000 copies in print and tops the New York Times nonfiction list, where it has been for 15 straight weeks. It is also No. 1 in Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy ranks No. 3 after ten weeks on the Times list, with 155,000 books issued.

Bloom, 56, a genial philosopher, professes himself to be "absolutely astounded" at the impact of a work that he thought might have 5,000 or 6,000 buyers, "75% of whom I know." But somehow Bloom's gloomy tract (Simon & Schuster; $18.95) and Hirsch's book as well (Houghton Mifflin; $16.95) seem to be full of things a lot of people care about. Bloom's principal message: American universities, capitulating to 1960s activists, abandoned sound liberal arts teaching for trendy, "relevant" studies in which all ideas have equal value. Bloom deplores this surrender to "cultural relativism," which he considers a flawed derivative of Nietzsche's nihilism. Under its influence, higher education has failed to keep the flame of true learning or guide today's students, many of whom appear to Bloom to be sex-ridden moneygrubbers marching to the beat of rock music ("commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy," says the professor). The only sure way back, he claims, is to re- establish the disciplines of the liberal arts, with the classic philosophers and European savants at the heart of the curriculum.

+ Hirsch, 59, a professor of English, aims his blast at academe from a slightly different sniper's perch. He charges that schools have given up teaching the unifying facts, values and writings of Western culture, creating a generation of cultural illiterates. As evidence he cites a 1985 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Among other lacunae, it found that two-thirds of the high schoolers surveyed did not know when the Civil War was fought, and half could not identify Winston Churchill. "One's literacy depends upon the breadth of one's acquaintance with a national culture," Hirsch writes.

Hirsch's villain is Educational Philosopher John Dewey, who, in his landmark 1915 treatise Schools of Tomorrow, espoused the learning of skills rather than information. The long-range result, says Hirsch, is that children can now decode words but lack the understanding to put what they read into broad, insightful context. The Hirsch antidote: heavy doses of Western cultural lore, as represented by a list of nearly 5,000 entries in an appendix labeled "What Literate Americans Know," ranging from A ("act of God") to Z ("Zeitgeist"), and including "1066" and "White Christmas (song)." Knowing at least a commercial idea when it sees one, namely the untrivial sales impact of the list, Houghton Mifflin promises more where it came from, i.e., a dictionary of cultural terms and perhaps an electronic game to test cultural literacy.