Rummaging through a shelf last week for books I could donate to the Magee Library’s book sale room (and clean out the study), I pulled out a book I had read 25 years ago, Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
I sat down under my reading lamp to flip through it, started reading, and got up an hour later knowing this was a book I couldn’t give away. It’s about literacy, language and learning, three of my favorite topics, and if you’re interested in those things I want you to read the book too. But you’ll have to find your own copy since I’m keeping mine. If the library doesn’t have it, Amazon has it in paperback, hardback and audio versions.
Twenty-five years ago I was teaching English at Magee High School when I read a review of the book Cultural Literacy, ordered it, read it cover to cover in three days, and began talking to my students about it.
Hirsch defines “cultural literacy” as the common knowledge of culture that enables readers to make sense of what they read. Cultural literacy goes beyond the ability to call words. The author says it’s “the grasp of background information that writers and speakers assume their readers and listeners already have.” Without that information, a person can read all the words but miss the half the meaning of a passage.
For example, any moderately good reader can read the word draconian. But could she understand this sentence: “The regime’s population adjusted to the draconian rule of their new leader.”
To really get the meaning of the sentence, the reader must know that Draco was an ancient Greek lawgiver whose rules were cruelly severe. Or at least know that draconian refers to something strict and cruel or unjust, even if she doesn’t know who or where Draco was. Lacking that knowledge, she misses the meaning of the sentence.
I used to agonize over the plight of my students who told me that they had read the assigned story, and I was sure they had, but they couldn’t answer questions about it. Cultural Literacy shed light on the problem.
The book’s subtitle is What Every American Needs to Know, and it turns out that we need to know quite a lot about the world in order to read with understanding. It isn’t enough to be able to sound out or visually recognize words.
Hirsch quotes literacy expert Jeanne S. Chall, who said, “World knowledge is essential to the development of reading and writing skills.” And world knowledge is what so many of our students lack.
Even before I read the book, I used to tell my classes, “The more you know, the more you know.” They thought I was crazy, but I explained that everything they learned would help them to learn something else.
It’s just Hirsch’s point, Simpson County style. Anything you learn gives you knowledge for understanding something else.
If a high school graduate has never heard of Oedipus, a Greek tragedy about a man who was fated to kill his father and marry his mother, that student will have no clue to what his college psychology teacher is talking about when he discusses the Oedipus complex.
If a person has no knowledge of the great battle cry, “Remember the Alamo,” he will see no sense in the title of the new book Forget the Alamo. So what, you say? If he has never heard of the Alamo, he has probably missed out on more than just Texas history.
The fun part of Hirsch’s book is “The List” in the back of the book, hundreds of terms, dates, names and phrases that you should know in order to read well. He suggests that in order to read and listen with understanding, we need at least a slight knowledge of terms like “sang froid,” “feudalism,” “Betty Friedan,” “veni, vidi, vici,” “Magna Carta,” and “let the cat out of the bag,” plus hundreds of other things that writers and speakers refer to and expect us to understand without explanation.
Here’s a good test for you. The List opens with six historical dates that all English speakers should know. Can you identify all of them?
1066
1492
1776
1861-1865
1914-1918
1939-1945
My guess is that the average student today cannot identify most of them. That’s partly the fault of an education system that focuses on processes rather than specific information. Hirsch’s work explains why learning history, literature, philosophy, science and the arts is so important.
Sometimes that point is lost in the schools’ scramble to prepare kids for jobs and figure out which gender they are.
