My main emotion when I read Pamela Druckerman is envy, because she is saying things, good things, that I have been saying and sometimes writing about, for years. Yet she is a New York Times columnist! And I’m not. Get over it, Alex. We can’t all be Times columnists. Good for her.
My envy bone was struck this week with her column about becoming a French citizen, and what that entails. She notes, with apparent surprise, that being French has always meant learning or adopting a set of common practices and cultural knowledge, from how you hold a fork, to poems you cite.
In short, French people have what E.D. Hirsch called “Cultural Literacy,” something I highlight and endorse in my chapter on education and language in my latest book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies.
This is not such a strange thing for a country to have. In fact, many would say it’s essential.
Both language and culture are far more constructed things than most people realize. Druckerman highlights how France created not only a national culture, but French as a national language, by wiping out or pushing aside regional languages and dialects, through a strong national education system. While there were losses here that I don’t want to paper over, having a common language and culture made France more democratic, both politically and economically.
She may not realize that this is also true with The United States. In the first half century of the nation, in a public private partnership with folks like Noah Webster, there was an effort both to create and standardize a new American version of English, and to create a culture that we could all learn, which included tales like George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, and basic civics about how our government works. The sense that this common education was essential for a democracy helped fuel the common school movements in the first half of the 19th century.
The Common Core movement in public schools, speaking from a mountain top perspective, is a good thing because there is some recognition that we need a common body of knowledge to function well as a country. Of course when it comes to specifics of how the Common Core is being carried out, I have as much criticism as anyone else.
To continue this discussion read my book!