Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1984)

This book was a huge - and very pleasant - surprise for me. I read it in connection with my course (and interest in) Media & Minds. I thought I had read or at least knew of the most important works in the field of media ecology - McLuhan, Ong, Goody, Postman, etc. No Sense of Place had only recently registered in my awareness. So my expectation was that it would, at most, fill in a few new details. Instead, what I found was a book that not only made a new, and very innovative, argument about the impact of television. Much more broadly, I think the book qualifies as a significant contribution to social theory (and it turns out it's been cited more than 8,000 times). Meyrowitz does this by combining Erving Goffman with Marshall McLuhan. Goffman, about whom only the title of his most famous book - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - had given me an inkling of his ideas, turns out to be more complex and interesting than I had realized. His theory is that we are performing on many stages (not just one, as I had thought), while also retreating to a "back stage" for rehearsal of our "front stage" roles and for rest. So it turns out that Goffman's theory is much more about roles than I had suspected, and hence is also relevant to explaining group formation. But Goffman's theory is static, and this is where McLuhan comes in. Meyrowitz argues that new media change informational flows, as with the introduction of TV, thereby changing "situations." These define roles, and so as situations change, so too do the borders between front stage and back stage. Meyrowitz applies this quite persuasively to explain many of the changes in American society since the 1960s, thus offering a worthy alternative to Ronald Inglehart's account, which revolves around the shift from material to post-material values. Just as Postman's Amusing Ourselves made arguments about TV that now also seem remarkably prescient about our digital age, so too do Meyrowitz's arguments regularly seem to anticipate changes we are now living through.

Leon Botstein, Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (1997)

This book launched the network (Bard High School Early Colleges) in which I now teach. Frankly, I had mixed reactions to it. The book is wider ranging than I expected - while Botstein makes arguments that lend themselves to our "early college" model, they are not the focus of the book (which, truth be told, meanders somewhat, though often in interesting directions). In short, I was surprised that this book inspired Michael Bloomberg's chancellor of education to reach out to Botstein and propose a collaboration, which led to the founding of BHSEC Manhattan in 2001. The early parts of the book I found less persuasive. Botstein begins by focusing on - and lamenting - the pervasive pessimism he sees around him, which is a surprising commentary on the go-go '90s. If one were being charitable, one might say it's testimony to Botstein's independence of mind. However, he himself provides plenty of evidence - including the stagnation of middle-class wages since the 1970s - that would seem to make pessimism appear quite warranted. Also unconvincing was his main rationale for having students start college earlier - he rests his case on the earlier physical maturation of adolescents today compared to 50 or 100 years ago (for example, the onset of first menstruation is now more than a year earlier). Botstein never even attempts to show that this physical precocity has been matched by intellectual acceleration. The recent work of Jean Twenge on the "safetyism" of Generation Z (Generations) makes the opposite seem more likely - 16-year-olds today, for example, behave much like 13-year-olds of thirty years ago. In the second half of the book I began to warm to my Founding Father. As unachievable as it may be, his desire to inculcate a passion for learning resonated with me. He cites Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's "flow state" - the intense, edge-of-one's-capabilities engagement of the master musician or craftsman - as what we as teachers should aim to inspire and facilitate in our students. Botstein makes appealing suggestions about how to encourage a sense of wonder, curiosity, and intellectual modesty - all attitudes that I hold dear. So by the end of the book, I found myself engaged by Botstein's outlook and stance toward life, if not fully persuaded by his rationale for early college.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016)

Through his writings and organizational work (establishing the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986), Hirsch has done more than anybody else to promote the importance of knowledge - rather than generic skills and "creativity" - in education. In this persuasive book, he presents evidence that our educational system has been failing for much longer than I understood - since the 1960s, reading comprehension scores of American 17-year-olds have been declining or flat. He attributes this failure to three key ideas of progressive pedagogy: that children's natural curiosity, inclinations, and developmental stages should guide teaching; that education needs to be tailored to each individual ("child-centered" pedagogy is a phrase one hears constantly, and without further explanation, as if its value were self-evident, in these parts); and, most fatally, that schools should aim to teach general skills, rather than knowledge. Hirsch offers plenty of evidence in his indictment of these erroneous idea, but perhaps his most telling evidence comes from France, where a knowledge-centered curriculum was replaced, in 1989, by a progressive approach. Over the next two decades, French education declined on all sorts of measures (see below for more on these criteria). Finally, Hirsch presents his alternative, vocabulary-building and knowledge-rich, curriculum in some detail, and again proffers significant evidence as to its efficacy. In what, though, does this efficacy consist, according to Hirsch? For Hirsch, the advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum are three fold: it improves all students' chances of becoming competent, successful adults; it especially helps students from poor and otherwise deprived backgrounds, thus helping to close the achievement gap (something that Hirsch comes back to repeatedly); finally, a common foundation of knowledge is necessary for meaningful citizenship, and hence for the health of our democracy. Since his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which put him on the map in the education wars, Hirsch has often been tarred as a conservative. (It didn't help him in this regard that Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which was, in fact, conservative, came out the same year.) In fact, though, Hirsch's approach is not conservative in any simple sense of the term. It's true that he believes that for children to become successful (in a broad sense of the term) adults, they have to be familiar with what what other adults know - the shared knowledge of the culture, a public good. He thus values this knowledge for pragmatic reasons. But he acknowledges - and even welcomes the fact - that what's shared can grow and change. Another criticism has been that Hirsch's approach requires an even greater emphasis on testing than is the case now. In fact, however, Hirsch expresses criticism of the current scale (and content) of testing, which absorbs a large portion of school time and which, given the fundamental error of trying to teach students generic skills, is bound to produce poor results and frustrated students, teachers, and parents. Hirsch's argument resonates with, and greatly deepens, what I've seen during my last decade of teaching high school. Students' vocabularies and knowledge of the world are suprisingly limited and fragmented. Too seldom does one feel part of a system that is building systematic knowledge.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994)

I stumbled upon this in my search for readings for my course Media and Minds, and it's a gem. Birkerts first drew me in because of some biographical overlap: growing up the child of European immigrants (in his case, both parents from Latvia, in mine my mother from Germany, but my father, with his rejection of his Irish Catholic background and of American culture and his interest in East Asia, might well have been an immigrant), Birkerts was painfully aware of how he didn't fit in with his peers, and wanted to assimilate. Eventually, however - and this is just my surmise - Birkerts's outsider status has given him a perch from which he castigates the entire drift of our culture in our electonic age. The book is a worthy sequel and complement to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Written 10 years after Postman's work, and on the cusp of the internet revolution, Gutenberg Elegies is astonishingly prescient in its picture of what has come to pass: the fracturing of attention and selves, the loss of interiority, etc. First, though, Birkerts gives an account of how "deep reading" (a term he coins here and which Maryanne Wolf, in Reader, Come Home, borrows) - which was on its way out already 30 years ago - allows us to explore other worlds and uncover or invent other selves, other versions of us.