With unemployment holding at a little over 10%, Sol Stern points out E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy. Hirsch observed that students need to have a core of knowledge in order to read well, despite being versed in reading skills. Skills alone are not the sum of learning.

Stern gives an illustration of the problem facing many American students.

My children were students at P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School. Our school enjoyed a reputation as one of the city’s education jewels, and parents clamored to get their kids in. But most of the teachers and principals had trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College, a bastion of so-called progressive education, and militantly defended the progressive-ed doctrine that facts were pedagogically unimportant. I once asked my younger son and some of his classmates, all top fifth-grade students, whether they knew anything about the historical figure after whom their school was named. Not only were they clueless about the military leader who delivered the final blow that brought down America’s slave empire; they hardly knew anything about the Civil War, either. When I complained to the school’s principal, he reassured me: “Our kids don’t need to learn about the Civil War. What they are learning at P.S. 87 is how to learn about the Civil War.”

So when will they actually learn details of the Civil War? When they’re trying to relax in front of the History Channel between specials on UFOs and Nostradamus?