SOURCE: A review of The Culture We Deserve, in The Humanist, Vol. 51, No. 6, November-December, 1991, pp. 46-7.

In the following positive review of The Culture We Deserve, Shore clarifies and defends Barzun's pessimistic view of contemporary thought, education, and art.

A superficial family resemblance exists among a number of the educational documents to appear during the 1980s, among them the U.S. government study A Nation at Risk, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Mortimer Adler's The Paideia Proposal, and E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. Although each of these works differs significantly in emphasis, all share a mood of urgency—almost despair—toward the knowledge and skills students possess and argue for a rediscovery of some common body of knowledge which can serve as a unifying element for both formal education and society as a whole.

The Culture We Deserve seems at first glance to be a...