Dear Mr. Hirsch

Dear Mr. Hirsch,

I’ve been reading some of your work about Cultural Literacy, and I have some comments about your theory. I’ll preface my thoughts by saying that I usually give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I choose to see everyone’s positive qualities.

First, I totally agree with you that spoon-feeding children of the poor would not be helping them grow toward a productive future. It reminds me of the phrase:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day…teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

Giving these children the skills to work hard and overcome the difficult financial situations to which they were brought into would better suit their long-term needs.

So that was it—your only positive quality.

You seem incredibly racist, sexist, ageist, and overall insensitive to our differences as human beings. How dare you demand, and assume that each student is capable, to learn in the exact same way? It is completely unreasonable, dated, and irresponsible. Unfortunately, you can’t stop the progressive education movement. It’s happening before our eyes. We can’t stop the creation of technology, and we certainly can’t stop parents from raising our students with it since birth. How then, are we to just to use memorization? If the “teacher has it” and the “student needs it,” why can’t we use fun and inventive ways to transfer that information?

I agree that our students should assimilate, but to mix students together does NOT mean that they become the same. Why should I be insensitive to the presence of Jewish children (or any children who has experienced mass hatred in some way) when teaching about the Holocaust? For them, hearing the brute facts might be so unbearable that they tune out the teacher’s babble and become incapable of learning any of the information. Perhaps, for the sake of these students’ learning, the information could have been presented in a more creative way.

Part of becoming a productive working member of society is having the skill to work with other people. Part of becoming a tennis player is developing the skill of holding the racquet, positioning the feet, and aiming the racquet just so that it can slam the ball accurately to the other side. Part of learning how to stir fry food is obtaining the skill to know what the flames should look like on the stove, how much liquid should be in the wok, how small to cut the pieces, how to identify when the food is thoroughly cooked and desirable. These skills can ONLY be learned from DOING. A teacher cannot TELL a student how to work with others and expect them to perfect it. A teacher cannot TELL a student how to play tennis, and a teacher certainly cannot TELL the students how to make stir fry. SHOWING these students would be insufficient as well. The only way that these students will learn certain skills is for them to experience it themselves.

Your theory is completely ineffective in our current time, and it disregards too many elements of a child’s life. Unfortunately for you, a child is a package deal. We can’t change their core, and we can’t make them be what we wish for them to be. As educators, it is our job to do whatever it takes for the children to learn skills necessary for life.

Good luck convincing your readers that your way is THE way.

Sincerely,
Erica Roth