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[Many people tell me that my suggestion that every U.S. high school 
student should read at least one complete nonfiction book before 
graduation is idealistic and impractical. How times have changed since 
Jefferson's day! Will Fitzhugh]


    "In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 
1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Thomas Jefferson recommended 
that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the 
following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, 
Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, 
Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, 
Seneca, and Xenophon's Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, 
Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, 
Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift. Jefferson's plan of book learning 
was modest compared to the Puritan education of the seventeenth century 
as advocated by John Milton.

    The Romantics rejected such advice. They opposed the reading of 
books as unnatural, as arising from the artificial habits and 
constraints of civilization. Wordsworth wrote:

        One impulse from a vernal wood
        Can teach us more of man
        Of moral evil and of good
        Than all the sages can.

Emerson claimed that the farm was a better teacher than the school: "We 
are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen 
years & and come out at last with a bellyful of words & and do not know 
a thing...The farm, the farm is the right school...The farm is a piece 
of the world, the School house is not." John Dewey's lab school, which 
he started in Chicago in 1896, was based on the conviction that children 
would learn what they needed by engaging in practical activities such as 
cooking.

    Today our schools and colleges of education, the inheritors of these 
ideas, are still the nerve centers of an anti-intellectual tradition. 
One of their most effective rhetorical tics is to identify the 
acquisition of broad knowledge with "rote learning" of "mere facts"--in 
subtle disparagement of "merely verbal" presentation in books and 
through the coherent explanations of teachers. Just like Rousseau, 
Wordsworth and Dewey, our schools of education hold that unless school 
knowledge is connected to "real life" in a "hands-on" way, it is 
unnatural and dead; it is "rote" and "meaningless." But nobody advocates 
rote learning of disconnected facts. Neither Milton nor Thomas Jefferson 
nor any of their more thoughtful contemporaries who championed book 
learning advocated rote learning. What they did advocate was the 
systematic acquisition of broad knowledge. And such knowledge is 
precisely what it takes to become a good reader."


E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Knowledge Deficit
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pp. 9-10



============



"Teach by Example"
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

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