list will reveal that it includes names, places, events, and ideas from all over the world, and implies significant artistic, intellectual, and social contributions from diverse ethnic groups. To the extent that Hirsch’s list is intended for American students, its diversity was inevitable.
The idea of diversity is a rich narrative around which to organize the schooling of the young. But there are right reasons to do this, and wrong ones. The worst possible reason, as I have already discussed, is to use the fact of ethnic diversity to inspire a curriculum of revenge; that is, for a group that has been oppressed to try to even the score with the rest of America by singling itself out for excessive praise and attention. Although the impulse to revenge is in itself understandable, such a view will lead to weird falsifications, divisiveness, and isolation. There is a joke about this that Jews tell to each other about themselves: One day, in a small town in Russia, circa 1900, a Jew notices many people in panic, running this way and that, shouting for help. He stops another Jew and askswhat is happening. He is told that there is a circus in town and the lions have escaped from their cages. “Is this good or bad for the Jews?” he asks.
The joke is intended to mock a self-absorbed attitude that allows for no larger identification than with one’s own group. One may as well ask, Is Shakespeare good for the Jews? Are Newton’s laws good for the Jews? There are, to be sure, certain Jewish sects whose answer to these questions is, in fact, “bad for the Jews,” because secular learning of any sort is considered a distraction from Talmudic studies, and a threat to piety. But that is exactly the point. Such sects have their own schools and their own narratives, and wish to keep their young away from public education. Any education that promotes a near-exclusive concern with one’s own group may have value, but is hostile to the idea of a public education and to the growth of a common culture. Certainly, there may be occasions when it is natural and appropriate to ask, for example, Was this good or bad for blacks, or Latinos, or Koreans? But the point of the joke is that if everything is seen through the lens of ethnicity, then isolation, parochialness, and hostility, not to mention absurdity, are the inevitable result.
There is, in addition, another reason for emphasizing diversity, one of which we may be skeptical. I refer to the psychological argument that claims the self-esteem of some students may be raised by focusing their attention on the accomplishments of those of their own kind, especially if the teachers are of their own kind. I cannot say if this is so or not, but it needs to be pointed out that while a diminished self-esteem is no small matter, one of the main purposes of public education—it is at the core of a common culture—is the idea that students must esteem something other than self. This is a point Cornel West has stressed in addressing both whites andblacks. For example, after reviewing the pernicious effects of race consciousness, which include poverty and paranoia, he ends his book
Race Matters
by saying, “We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats.… We are at a crucial crossroads in the history of this nation—and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.” 3 I take this to be a heartfelt plea for the necessity of providing ourselves and especially our young with a comprehensive narrative that makes a constructive and unifying use of diversity.
Fortunately, there is such a narrative. It has both a theoretical and a practical component, which gives it special force. The theoretical component comes to us from science, expressed rather abstractly in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The law tells us that although matter can be neither created nor destroyed (the First Law), it tends toward becoming useless.
The idea of diversity is a rich narrative around which to organize the schooling of the young. But there are right reasons to do this, and wrong ones. The worst possible reason, as I have already discussed, is to use the fact of ethnic diversity to inspire a curriculum of revenge; that is, for a group that has been oppressed to try to even the score with the rest of America by singling itself out for excessive praise and attention. Although the impulse to revenge is in itself understandable, such a view will lead to weird falsifications, divisiveness, and isolation. There is a joke about this that Jews tell to each other about themselves: One day, in a small town in Russia, circa 1900, a Jew notices many people in panic, running this way and that, shouting for help. He stops another Jew and askswhat is happening. He is told that there is a circus in town and the lions have escaped from their cages. “Is this good or bad for the Jews?” he asks.
The joke is intended to mock a self-absorbed attitude that allows for no larger identification than with one’s own group. One may as well ask, Is Shakespeare good for the Jews? Are Newton’s laws good for the Jews? There are, to be sure, certain Jewish sects whose answer to these questions is, in fact, “bad for the Jews,” because secular learning of any sort is considered a distraction from Talmudic studies, and a threat to piety. But that is exactly the point. Such sects have their own schools and their own narratives, and wish to keep their young away from public education. Any education that promotes a near-exclusive concern with one’s own group may have value, but is hostile to the idea of a public education and to the growth of a common culture. Certainly, there may be occasions when it is natural and appropriate to ask, for example, Was this good or bad for blacks, or Latinos, or Koreans? But the point of the joke is that if everything is seen through the lens of ethnicity, then isolation, parochialness, and hostility, not to mention absurdity, are the inevitable result.
There is, in addition, another reason for emphasizing diversity, one of which we may be skeptical. I refer to the psychological argument that claims the self-esteem of some students may be raised by focusing their attention on the accomplishments of those of their own kind, especially if the teachers are of their own kind. I cannot say if this is so or not, but it needs to be pointed out that while a diminished self-esteem is no small matter, one of the main purposes of public education—it is at the core of a common culture—is the idea that students must esteem something other than self. This is a point Cornel West has stressed in addressing both whites andblacks. For example, after reviewing the pernicious effects of race consciousness, which include poverty and paranoia, he ends his book
Race Matters
by saying, “We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other’s throats.… We are at a crucial crossroads in the history of this nation—and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately.” 3 I take this to be a heartfelt plea for the necessity of providing ourselves and especially our young with a comprehensive narrative that makes a constructive and unifying use of diversity.
Fortunately, there is such a narrative. It has both a theoretical and a practical component, which gives it special force. The theoretical component comes to us from science, expressed rather abstractly in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The law tells us that although matter can be neither created nor destroyed (the First Law), it tends toward becoming useless.
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