Writing about the academic culture wars, we have often had occasion
to warn about the institutionalization of a 1960s-style radicalism.
Although it is an inelegant mouthful, that polysyllabic phrase
seemed the neatest formula for describing the disturbing transformation
of cultural radicalism from a force besieging the establishment from
the outside into a blithely accepted— even celebrated—aspect of the
very establishment culture it had once sought to destroy. This project of
redefinition—of the fringe as mainstream, the periphery as center,
the deviant as normal—is enormously complex and has wrought still
unfathomed changes in our society and way of looking at the world.

Indeed, a full inventory of such changes would amount to a chronicle
of a revolution—a cultural revolution in which the moral and
intellectual fruits of our civilization have been dangerously
compromised by principles whose full implications have yet to
reveal themselves. As with any revolution, there are dramatic, even
melodramatic, episodes to be recounted. In day to day life, however,
America’s cultural revolution long ago began working itself out
most patently in the pedestrian activities of establishment
bureaucracies.

We were reminded of this recently when
a press release from the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics crossed our desk.
The ALSC, founded in 1994 to provide an independent alternative to
the Modern Language Association and its radical buffoonery, is one
of the few bright spots on the academic landscape today. With a
robust membership now totaling about two thousand, it has emerged as
a staunch defender of literary values at a time when literature—when cultural life
generally—is everywhere subordinated to the egalitarian political agendas
bequeathed to us by the 1960s. The latest benison performed by the
ALSC has been to publicize and forthrightly
to condemn the “Standards for the English Language Arts” that
the National Council of Teachers of English recently promulgated for
students from kindergarten through high school. The ALSC urged the rejection of these new
standards—which seem already to have been widely adopted–“because
of their disdain for literature, and because they reflect the
widespread moral and intellectual confusion that has recently
infected education at the college level.”

As the statement from the ALSC notes, the new standards
“drastically diminish” the role of literature in the teaching of
what the NCTE calls “language arts”—a phrase that is itself a splendid piece of
bureaucratic euphemism, concealing as it does a concerted shift
away from literature toward politics in the new standards.
It is bad enough that only one of the twelve standards advocated by the
NCTE is devoted to literature; even more insidious is the
sociological imperative that infuses the document and according
to which literature is henceforth to be taught not as literature but
as a cultural artifact no different in kind from, say, advertising,
political propaganda, or television. “Literary criteria,” the
ALSC notes, “are subverted by a relentless and misguided
intellectual egalitarianism.”

If this seems overstated, consider that in
the “Professional Summary” of the standards published
by the NCTE, teachers are urged to adopt an “expanded definition
of literacy” in which “being literate … means being
active, critical, and creative users of print and spoken language as
well as the visual language of film and television, commercial and
political advertising, photography and more.” In other words, in
this “expanded” definition of literacy, watching
TV—“creatively,” of course—might just as well qualify as an
example of “literacy” as mastering Paradise Lost. In brief, this
is an exercise in semantic “expansion” that George Orwell would have
admired as an accomplished example of Newspeak.

Insofar as these new standards are enforced, artistic and literary
concerns will perforce take a distant back seat to other imperatives.
Accordingly, the new standards employ all the latest multicultural
buzz words. They speak, for example, of teaching students “to view
and critique [sic] American and world history and contemporary
life,” of choosing “texts” on account of their “relevance” to
students’ interest–instead of their intrinsic merit—and of
encouraging students to develop “an understanding of and respect for
diversity in language use, patterns and dialects across cultures,
ethnic groups, etc.”

Et cetera, indeed. The ALSC document notes
that the Department of Education, an original supporter of the new
standards, withdrew funding because of concerns about
“lack of educational substance.” This might seem like a good
thing. But it is worth remembering that the Department of Education
under the Clinton administration has made similar standards a
priority. In the “Goals 2000: Educate America Act,” signed into law
in March 1994, the effort to force states and localities to adopt
“gender equitable and multicultural materials” played a prominent
role. The purpose of this legislation, as one critic observed, was
to encourage “egalitarian character transformation”—an enterprise
that has more to do with reeducation than education.

In any event, the NCTE standards are starry-eyed and naïve as well as
misguided. According to the Professional Summary, “all students in
this country can achieve the standards set forth in this
document”—even if, as is said in the mandatory political coda, “standards
alone cannot erase the impact of poverty, ethnic or cultural
discrimination, low levels of family literacy, and social and
political disenfranchisement.” But think about it: what kind of
“standards” are they that “all students in this country can
achieve”? There is also the unhappy irony that this document
proposing to enhance literacy should itself be full of subliterate
bureaucratic doublespeak: “Students,” we read, “employ a wide range
of strategies as they write and use different writing process
elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for
a variety of purposes.” Writing what elements? Writing process
what? We suppose that such rebarbative nonsense is only to be expected from
“expanded definitions of literacy”—which is one reason that we
would settle for encouraging the old-fashioned, narrow brand of
literacy in which being able to read intelligently and write clearly
were paramount tests of accomplishment.