ABSTRACT
As it turned out, secondary public schools have become places of antiintellectualism, and of socialization that is understood in a very narrow sensebasically conformity and discipline. “Hirsch is dead right,” Rorty writes, “in saying that we Americans no longer give our children a secondary education that enables them to function as citizens of a democracy.”2 And higher education has, according to Rorty, too often been about replacing the “truths” students learned in high school with an alternative set of politically correct “truths.” What, then, might progressives put forward in the way of a response to Hirsch and Bloom, a response that does more than dismiss them? According to Rorty, Bloom is right in thinking that higher education too often is about indoctrinating young people with politically correct truths. But he is “dead wrong” in thinking that the point of higher education is to introduce young people to “the theoretical life” or the great “truths” of Western civilization. “The point of nonvocational higher education is, instead, to help students realize that they can reshape themselves.” What does it mean to reshape oneself? For Rorty, to reshape is to “rework the self-image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent citizens, into a new self-image, that they themselves have helped to create.” Secondary education, Rorty argues, can be ceded to the cultural conservatives, to produce culturally literate young people, who are familiar with “what their elders take to be true.” Socialization, after all, must come before individualization. Higher education can promote individualization by “inciting doubt and stimulating imagination,” by encouraging young people to challenge the “prevailing consensus.” If elementary and secondary schools go about their business of producing culturally literate citizens, and colleges go about their business of producing “self-creating individuals,” then the battle between progressives and conservatives can be resolved in a new, negotiated manner.3
