Cultural Literacy Made Easy

Lists and books of lists are the intellectual fast food of our time: they give our brains short-term fueling in snack-sized portions with a spicy zing. A really imaginative list ("Ten Sequels that Surpassed the Original Version: 1. The New Testament . . .") can even provide enough mild mental gymnastics to let you feel you're fighting flab amidst the grey matter. It was rivetting news for list-addicts, then, when the rumor broke that school curricula everywhere could soon by replaced by a list-to-end-all lists: the nearly 5,000 items that E.D. Hirsch claims comprise "the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world" (p. xiii).

It had been months since I'd had a good list-fix myself, so I picked up Hirsch's book with a certain anticipatory thrill. Undaunted by the discovery that 150 pages of text separated me from the famous list, I plunged in. Some of those pages were trying: a depressing demonstration of the cultural illiteracy rampant today, a tendency to hold Jean Jacques Rousseau responsible for the errors of John Dewey, and the discouraging dullness of some social science experiments cited. But the sections dealing with cognitive psychology and with the historical development of national languages (on which Hirsch bases his discussion of the analogous formation of national cultures) are fascinating, and his contention that our ability to communicate with one another, in an ever more complex society, depends on our possessing a common vocabulary of knowledge, is persuasive.

Hirsch's argument runs counter to the widespread belief that it is somehow more democratic to enforce only the lowest educational standards. The bestselling success of Hirsch's tract may at last suggest that Americans are now insecure in their ignorance. A nation that prefers its print journalism at or below the level of the evening news, has nevertheless found merit in Hirsch's goal: to produce high school graduates able to understand the language and allusions of a newspaper of record. To achieve this end, Hirsch proposes that we abandon as untenable the educational practice of trying to teach "skills" in the absence of content. He advocates a return to basics so thoroughgoing as to include even the rehabilitation of rote learning as a respectable pedagogic method. Returning content to the curriculum, according to Hirsch, means that students would acquire, by rote or other means, the "vocabulary" of items that make up the CultLit list.

Those who complain that Hirsch's program would produce a level of cultural literacy just sufficient for solving crossword puzzles have to admit that even this would be preferable to the attainments of our current population of 17 year olds, half of whom were found, in a 1985 NAEP study released this year, to be unable to say in which half century the First World War was fought. For the republic to function as its founders intended, it would doubtless be a good idea to educate all its citizens at least to Hirsch's minimal standards. And who would quarrel with Hirsch's claim that the higher one's level of general knowledge, the higher one's comprehension of any communication past the Dick and Jane stage?

Of course there are weaknesses in Hirsch's platform. His repeated assertions that the literacy he advocates would not be elitist because it would be universal depends, circularly, on the assumption that such cultural fluency is within the reach of all (without raising the question of cost, or the still thornier one of motivation. How will the hundreds of thousands of adolescents who can hardly be persuaded to stay in school long enough to sample the "shopping mall curriculum" Hirsch derides, be given stomach for the meat-and-potatoes learning that cultural literacy demands?). The author stresses that the standard adoption of his vocabulary of national culture would not preclude the preservation of various ethnic sub-cultures as well: but "hyphenated Americans" would all have to be culturally bilingual. The nagging question, of whether a national cultural literacy...