from VCCA Journal, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring/Summer 1988, 47-48
© Copyright 1988 VCCA Journal
If you're a teacher, you should read Professor Hirsch's Cultural Literacy despite the arrogance of its subtitle, What Every American Needs to Know. Professor Hirsch thinks students ought to know something. After he supports this position for a hindred and forty-five pages, he lists in sixty-three pages a minimal list of what they ought to know. The book has been great popular success.
What is it that makes the general public so interested in this work?
The answer probably doesn't lie in the first section, which reviews the content-versus-skill conflict over the last two hundred years but emphasizes recent studies which support the content side of the argument. A few quotations give the gist of Professor Hirsch's position.
"We want to make our students competent to communicate with Americans throughout the land." "The antidote to growing specialization is to reinvigorate the unspecialized domain of literate discourse, where all can meet on common ground." "Successful communication depends upon shared associations." "...literacy is a function of a national culture rather than a local culture." "...dry incompetence is not the necessary alternative to lively ignorance." "...traditional education, which alone yields the flexible skill of natural literacy, outperforms utilitarian education even by utilitarian standares." "What is required is education for change, not for static job competence." "The greatest human individuality is developed in response to a tradition, not in response to disorderly, uncertain, and fragmented education."
This section is (or should be) stimulating to a teacher but probably not to the general reader.
What probably does account for the popularity of the book is the list compiled by Hirsch and his colleagues Joseph Kett (history) and James Trefil (physics) and titled "What Literate Americans Know." (Professor Trefil's terms from natural science are "What Americans Ought to Know," a different thing.)
The list has drawn the most comment from reviewers.
It is challenging and amusing; it has the charm of Trivial Pursuit.
And it provides possibilities for quibbling. (Professor Hirsch was wise to point out that the list is tentative.)
Do saliva and Spiro Agnew deserve inclusion? Is Babbitt a book title or George F. Babbitt or Irving Babbitt? Why Joe Louis but but not Jack Dempsey? Why Kinsey but not Masters and Johnson? Why The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne but The Red Badge of Courage and not Crane? Why "These are the times that try men's souls" but not Paine? Why Stein and Steinem but not Steinbeck? Why Edwardian without Edward VII? Why Oxford and Cambridge but not Harvard or Yale? Why Jesse Owens but not Bobby Jones? Why Whistler's mother but not Whistler? Why Norman Rockwell but not Rockwell Kent? Why Winnie the Pooh but not Milne? (One trusts that in later editions Carl Sandburg will replace Carl Sandberg.)
Well, you see, it makes a good game. And it does get people thinking about content.
Surely every beginning teacher has thought of such a list. Just as surely the general public senses that public education falls short of what it ought to be and may be intrigued with the suggestion of a change which is comprehensible and paradoxically traditional. Perhaps people are attracted by the apparent simplicity of the proposition that a prerequisite to communication is having something to communicate.
Professor Hirsch meets head on the obvious charge that teaching the list could become a substitute for teaching knowledge. "How can I deny that such misuse of the list is not only a danger but a near certainty?"
His answer:
... the mere existence of the list ...will help people perceive that out previous reluctance to identify core information has seriously hindered the effective teaching of literacy... It should energize people to learn that only a few hundred pages of information stand between the literate and the illiterate, between dependence and autonomy.
A list of facts is better than no facts at all. And Professor Hirsch argues persuasively that knowing facts is the best route to a fulfilled individual and a better society.
Even if he's wrong, any teacher who deals with students below the graduate level should be familiar with this book.
Frank Adams retired from the English Department of James Madison University in 1982. He is currently teaching part time at Blue Ridge Community College and is affiliated with the real estate firm of Coldwell Banker Horsley & Constable in Harrisonburg, Va.