Well-meaning policy makers, as well as business leaders more concerned with competing in the global market, stress what the bureaucrats reduce to alphabet soup, called STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. No one doubts the importance of such skills, but man cannot live on bread alone, even if he designs and builds a better oven. "In the long run, America's true competitive edge," write Chester E. Finn and Diane Ravitch, both former assistant U.S. secretaries of education, "is not its technical prowess but its creativity, its imagination, its inventiveness, its people's capacity to devise new solutions, to innovate, to invest new organizational as well as technological forms, and to eke productivity gains out of what others see as static situations."
Reading skill alone doesn't necessarily contribute to deeper understanding. "Why is it that the more we emphasize reading in the early grades the less well our children read by the time they reach grade eight?" asks Core Knowledge Foundation founder E.D. Hirsch, who hits hard at the "knowledge deficit." Writing suffers, too.
The continuing popularity of Jane Austen's novels -- Hollywood can't get enough of them -- seems to be an anomaly. They're popular because audiences love the eloquent language and appreciate the author's critical eye, the irony and wit that make her sentences sparkle. These works are enriched by a moral core that emerges in the content of relationships, where action is determined by character. We can hope the movies Hollywood makes will take audiences back to the written word, to delve deeper into its riches.
There's a craving among both young and old today to understand a world enriched by fine writing and the arts, an expanded appreciation for what English poet Matthew Arnold described as "knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the world." When my father, who never got past the eighth grade, took me to Florence years ago, he sat for an hour before Michelangelo's David, overwhelmed by its power, and lamented that he had not discovered it when he was younger. It's never too late to develop an appreciation, but a head start pays great dividends.
President Bush once described education as "the great civil rights issue of our time." He's right about that. The bias against the study of the liberal arts is another prejudice we can do without.