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  • Back to BasicsA Politics of Meaning for Education
  • Svi Shapiro (bio)

Vol. 8, No. 1. 1993.

If the clinton administration wants to succeed in changing America’s education system, it must start by recognizing that the Right’s campaign to “return to basics” contains, at its heart, critical insights into the psychological, moral, and social context in which parents face their own future and that of their children. Although progressives have dismissed the conservative education agenda, citing its dehumanizing prescriptions and its distractions from the real issues, the Right has been able to harness deep-seated human concerns and anxieties to the practices and goals of schooling. As we build our own politics of educational meaning, it becomes imperative for us to take these concerns seriously and to address them in ways that will genuinely enhance the dignity, responsibility, freedom, and opportunities of the young.

Basic Skills: Toward a Curriculum for Survival

One of the rallying cries of those who believe America’s schools are cheating youngsters out of their educational “rights” has been the need to emphasize—or re-emphasize—the “basics.” On the surface, at least, what the basics are seems straightforward: teaching kids how to read, write, and do arithmetic. At one level there is an unassailable sensibleness to this demand: It is debilitating, disempowering, and deeply injurious for any American to lack these skills.


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There is in the expectation that schools will instruct children so that they are functionally literate and numerate an obvious logic that is reinforced daily by the experiences of working-class and middle-class parents. To the extent that radical or progressive educators have taken issue with the Right’s version of the argument for the primacy of basics in the schools, they have seemed out of touch with Americans’ everyday concerns, needs, and demands. No agenda for education can possibly succeed if it does not take seriously the importance of teaching reading, writing, and numeracy. …

Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett and his minions pilloried liberal educators’ policies and practices, blaming them for the decline in kids’ ability to read or write. Liberal education practitioners were depicted as hostile to the salience of the basics in school curricula.

There is considerable evidence that the conservative attack on liberal education policy was a misrepresentation or obfuscation of reality. Nevertheless, framing the educational debate in these terms has been disastrous for progressives, since it has cast the long-term struggle for social justice in America in opposition to the more immediate concerns of parents. …

Those observers who ascribe a reactionary aspect to the mentality of some proponents of a return to basics are correct. Encoded in the conservatives’ call for a new traditionalism in education is a wish for schools to prepare youngsters for jobs and roles of a bygone era, thereby to recapture that time and its cultural norms. There is, too, in the notion of the basics (as well as in the related concepts of “minimal competencies” and “performance standards”) the implicit expectation of self-sufficiency and self-reliance—compelling ideas in a time of economic and social insecurity. Thus, the power of the conservatives’ basic skills rhetoric stems from the equation we make between schooling and the acquisition of those skills or knowledge that might, in some way, protect individuals from the insecurity and predatory nature of our social and economic environment. Defined in this way, education becomes an expression of the concern for survival in a hazardous, fragile, and precarious world.

Parents’ desire for their children to master the basics is both understandable and rational, as is their desire for their children to possess the skills and knowledge they need to survive in the world. … Yet, if alarm over survival, for ourselves and our children, drives the wish that kids master the basics and become minimally competent, it is a sadly restricted and unimaginative notion of what it takes to survive. While the emotion-laden discourse of basics is deeply rooted in the experience of individuals struggling daily with the crises of survival—material, moral, spiritual, and psychological—in its present, limited form it offers very little to help us...

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