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Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
An argument for establishing a core curriculum of the basic information everyone needs to know, based on the author's hypothesis that being culturally literate is the foundation of intellectual competence.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Literacy & cultural literacy
The discovery of the schema
National language & national culture
American diversity & public discourse
Cultural literacy & the schools
The practical outlook
Appendix: what literate Americans know
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Preface
Literacy & cultural literacy
The discovery of the schema
National language & national culture
American diversity & public discourse
Cultural literacy & the schools
The practical outlook
Appendix: what literate Americans know
Notes
Index
251 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1987
89 people are currently reading
2571 people want to read
About the author
E.D. Hirsch Jr.
82 books111 followersE. D. Hirsch, Jr. is the founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several acclaimed books on education in which he has persisted as a voice of reason making the case for equality of educational opportunity.
A highly regarded literary critic and professor of English earlier in his career, Dr. Hirsch recalls being “shocked into education reform” while doing research on written composition at a pair of colleges in Virginia. During these studies he observed that a student’s ability to comprehend a passage was determined in part by the relative readability of the text, but even more by the student’s background knowledge.
This research led Dr. Hirsch to develop his concept of cultural literacy—the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. In 1986 he founded the Core Knowledge Foundation. A year later he published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which remained at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months. His subsequent books include The Schools We Need, The Knowledge Deficit, The Making of Americans, and most recently, How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation.
In How to Educate a Citizen (September, 2020), E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began thirty years ago with his classic bestseller Cultural Literacy, urging America’s public schools, particularly in Preschool – Grade 8, to educate our children using common, coherent and sequenced curricula to help heal and preserve the nation.
A highly regarded literary critic and professor of English earlier in his career, Dr. Hirsch recalls being “shocked into education reform” while doing research on written composition at a pair of colleges in Virginia. During these studies he observed that a student’s ability to comprehend a passage was determined in part by the relative readability of the text, but even more by the student’s background knowledge.
This research led Dr. Hirsch to develop his concept of cultural literacy—the idea that reading comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging background knowledge. In 1986 he founded the Core Knowledge Foundation. A year later he published Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, which remained at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months. His subsequent books include The Schools We Need, The Knowledge Deficit, The Making of Americans, and most recently, How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation.
In How to Educate a Citizen (September, 2020), E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began thirty years ago with his classic bestseller Cultural Literacy, urging America’s public schools, particularly in Preschool – Grade 8, to educate our children using common, coherent and sequenced curricula to help heal and preserve the nation.
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December 26, 2015
The best part of this book was the reference to "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" by Gilbert and Sullivan. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I can get down to some more specific critiques.
But before those critiques, I feel I should offer a disclaimer. I was homeschooled. I also go to a small private university with rigorous academic standards that I have started to realize are not standard college/university fare. Personally, I have always had a thirst for knowledge, sometimes wonder why not everyone is that way, and have intentionally pursued cultural literacy (though I would have just called it "being cultured" until reading this book) for many years. I'm not trying to toot my own horn and imply that I have achieved a higher level of intellectualism. I just want to say that I understand that I'm not in a strong position to go bashing our public school system when I have never experienced it myself or even had much interaction with those who have and when I have not experienced much outside of a small minority slice of the culture.
First off, this book is obviously dated, being published in the late eighties. However, the author acknowledges that the contents of cultural literacy (CL, for the sake of my fingers) will change over time as old items become obsolete and new ones enter the vocabulary. This is especially true in this era of social media with its viral youtube videos and meme-saturated vocabulary. I do agree that the core contents of CL remain relatively stable, but I think that even Hirsch could not have foreseen the rate at which even that core would morph over the years. As I perused the list of items known by those considered culturally literate, I couldn't help but think that many people today wouldn't know half the items on the list. Granted, some of that can be attributed to the natural state of flux in which CL will always be, but I think that other factors are the continuing decline of education in our country and the de-emphasis on the humanities that seems to be almost epidemic, even in many institutions of higher learning.
I found the chapter on the schema fascinating as I love learning about how the mind works. The way the human mind makes associations and sorts things out is so intricate and unfathomable--something that could only have been devised by a wonderful creator.
I couldn't help but feel that Hirsch is trying to advocate a cure-all for the problems of our nation. I agree that education is important--it's something I'm passionate about and plan to pursue as a career--and that improving our educational system will improve certain aspects of our country's state of affairs, and I also agree with much of what he says when it comes to CL equipping people to be responsible citizens and to improve their quality of life, but I know that America needs more than just educational reform.
I also have to wonder what happened to all those culturally illiterate people who went through the public school system of the 70's and 80's. How did they make it in the real world? Do they have jobs, can they support families, do they know anything? Excuse my sarcasm, but there were times while reading this book when I felt like Hirsch was saying that people who didn't attain CL would be doomed to a life at the lowest levels of the social stratosphere. One doesn't even need to know who Shakespeare is to be able to do well in many of the jobs out there. You don't know how much it pains me to say that, but it's true.
All in all, this book was informative, if a little less than engaging. On a personal enjoyment scale, I'd give it two stars. I gave it three because there's more that goes into a good book than how much I enjoy it. I've found that I will probably never see eye to eye with any non-fiction author who isn't a Christian because of our fundamental worldview differences, but that's not a bad thing, and I enjoy being challenged to interact with such authors.
But before those critiques, I feel I should offer a disclaimer. I was homeschooled. I also go to a small private university with rigorous academic standards that I have started to realize are not standard college/university fare. Personally, I have always had a thirst for knowledge, sometimes wonder why not everyone is that way, and have intentionally pursued cultural literacy (though I would have just called it "being cultured" until reading this book) for many years. I'm not trying to toot my own horn and imply that I have achieved a higher level of intellectualism. I just want to say that I understand that I'm not in a strong position to go bashing our public school system when I have never experienced it myself or even had much interaction with those who have and when I have not experienced much outside of a small minority slice of the culture.
First off, this book is obviously dated, being published in the late eighties. However, the author acknowledges that the contents of cultural literacy (CL, for the sake of my fingers) will change over time as old items become obsolete and new ones enter the vocabulary. This is especially true in this era of social media with its viral youtube videos and meme-saturated vocabulary. I do agree that the core contents of CL remain relatively stable, but I think that even Hirsch could not have foreseen the rate at which even that core would morph over the years. As I perused the list of items known by those considered culturally literate, I couldn't help but think that many people today wouldn't know half the items on the list. Granted, some of that can be attributed to the natural state of flux in which CL will always be, but I think that other factors are the continuing decline of education in our country and the de-emphasis on the humanities that seems to be almost epidemic, even in many institutions of higher learning.
I found the chapter on the schema fascinating as I love learning about how the mind works. The way the human mind makes associations and sorts things out is so intricate and unfathomable--something that could only have been devised by a wonderful creator.
I couldn't help but feel that Hirsch is trying to advocate a cure-all for the problems of our nation. I agree that education is important--it's something I'm passionate about and plan to pursue as a career--and that improving our educational system will improve certain aspects of our country's state of affairs, and I also agree with much of what he says when it comes to CL equipping people to be responsible citizens and to improve their quality of life, but I know that America needs more than just educational reform.
I also have to wonder what happened to all those culturally illiterate people who went through the public school system of the 70's and 80's. How did they make it in the real world? Do they have jobs, can they support families, do they know anything? Excuse my sarcasm, but there were times while reading this book when I felt like Hirsch was saying that people who didn't attain CL would be doomed to a life at the lowest levels of the social stratosphere. One doesn't even need to know who Shakespeare is to be able to do well in many of the jobs out there. You don't know how much it pains me to say that, but it's true.
All in all, this book was informative, if a little less than engaging. On a personal enjoyment scale, I'd give it two stars. I gave it three because there's more that goes into a good book than how much I enjoy it. I've found that I will probably never see eye to eye with any non-fiction author who isn't a Christian because of our fundamental worldview differences, but that's not a bad thing, and I enjoy being challenged to interact with such authors.
October 3, 2018
This is the best book on education that I have read. Excellent work. Interesting thesis: There are FACTS out there that educated citizens must know. Teaching skills is not enough. The reason is because communication of any sort is based on shared knowledge. Picture a Venn diagram: you and I can only communicate within our shared experience. Thus, a well-educated society is a society whose citizens have a solid grasp not only of their culture and language's shared knowledge, but of that of other cultures and languages as well.
Teaching skills becomes hindrance when all knowledge is deemed "neutral." For example, do we teach children to read by offering them stories from Aesop's fables, or do we offer them the cute grasshopper fable from the little-known tribe in the South American jungle? Hirsch wisely recommends Aesop. Aesop's Fables are better than the fables of the little-known jungle tribe. Not because they are better written or contain deeper truth, but because they are better known--and again, shared knowledge is critical to communication. There is merit to discovering other cultures, certainly. But when it's a skill you're after (reading, typing, orienteering), choose material that also contains useful content. Considering the hand-wringing over the state of America's educational system, it is time to stop pandering to the politically correct impulses that see every band of renegades and every tinhorn dictator as the moral, political, and cultural equivalent of the United States.
Teaching skills becomes hindrance when all knowledge is deemed "neutral." For example, do we teach children to read by offering them stories from Aesop's fables, or do we offer them the cute grasshopper fable from the little-known tribe in the South American jungle? Hirsch wisely recommends Aesop. Aesop's Fables are better than the fables of the little-known jungle tribe. Not because they are better written or contain deeper truth, but because they are better known--and again, shared knowledge is critical to communication. There is merit to discovering other cultures, certainly. But when it's a skill you're after (reading, typing, orienteering), choose material that also contains useful content. Considering the hand-wringing over the state of America's educational system, it is time to stop pandering to the politically correct impulses that see every band of renegades and every tinhorn dictator as the moral, political, and cultural equivalent of the United States.
March 11, 2009
Interesting contribution to the debate on National education. The gist of the book is that literacy is misunderstood. One can be proficient with a skill as a reader without having mastered comprehension of text. In other words the finite skill of interpreting letters into words and speed at which the reader translates them is only a small portion of comprehension.
Unfortunately, the Rousseau/Dewey approach to education rejects content heavy curriculum because they believed it distracts from the honing of skills. The authors persuasively demonstrate through experiments, surveys, and tests that acquiring a narrow set of reading skills is obscenely limited. Readers must have a context of the vocabulary being referred to in the text. They must have some appreciation with the words being used and ideas conveyed before elementary comprehension can be achieved.
To demonstrate this they present a newspaper article with words like foreclosure, Department of Agriculture, and Appeals Court. The newspaper article couldn't possibly be meaningful without at least a basic understanding of these words. They argue that everyone has a shared pool of knowledge which writers predict when producing their works. However, this overlapping pool is shrinking and authors can no longer feel confident that basic language need no further explanation. Imagine the absence of shared knowledge as a writer. New ideas will become next to impossible to disseminate to others without extensive explanation of supporting content that used to be understood by all literate persons.
I appreciate arguments supporting Classically based education. They argue a need to know about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, etc. They also argue for exposure to Shakespeare, Dickens, and other English Literature icons. I really appreciate the scientific approach to persuade for more Humanities and Social Sciences. Their arguments are based on a premise that educators and students want to have better reading comprehension and want to be able to more effectively communicate. The more knowledge literate Americans have in common, correlates with the efficiency of communications between one another.
Although their book easily convinces me of the conclusions they made,I wish more points were made for the merit of the Humanities. The book had laser focus on one point (schools need more content in education to improve reading comprehension). This resulted in a redundant but very clear argument. I wonder, though, if I could have walked away from an essay containing the essence of their work with any less knowledge.
Unfortunately, the Rousseau/Dewey approach to education rejects content heavy curriculum because they believed it distracts from the honing of skills. The authors persuasively demonstrate through experiments, surveys, and tests that acquiring a narrow set of reading skills is obscenely limited. Readers must have a context of the vocabulary being referred to in the text. They must have some appreciation with the words being used and ideas conveyed before elementary comprehension can be achieved.
To demonstrate this they present a newspaper article with words like foreclosure, Department of Agriculture, and Appeals Court. The newspaper article couldn't possibly be meaningful without at least a basic understanding of these words. They argue that everyone has a shared pool of knowledge which writers predict when producing their works. However, this overlapping pool is shrinking and authors can no longer feel confident that basic language need no further explanation. Imagine the absence of shared knowledge as a writer. New ideas will become next to impossible to disseminate to others without extensive explanation of supporting content that used to be understood by all literate persons.
I appreciate arguments supporting Classically based education. They argue a need to know about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, etc. They also argue for exposure to Shakespeare, Dickens, and other English Literature icons. I really appreciate the scientific approach to persuade for more Humanities and Social Sciences. Their arguments are based on a premise that educators and students want to have better reading comprehension and want to be able to more effectively communicate. The more knowledge literate Americans have in common, correlates with the efficiency of communications between one another.
Although their book easily convinces me of the conclusions they made,I wish more points were made for the merit of the Humanities. The book had laser focus on one point (schools need more content in education to improve reading comprehension). This resulted in a redundant but very clear argument. I wonder, though, if I could have walked away from an essay containing the essence of their work with any less knowledge.
November 26, 2025
This is an intriguing book and an argument worth reconsidering today. I wanted to read it after growing frustrated with what is becoming clearer and clearer to me: glaring gaps in my students' basic cultural literacy (I am not talking about knowing about Raymond Carver or atonal music or varieties of Korean fermented spirits--I’m referring to very basic stuff).
Hirsch's argument is essentially that education (in the mid-80s) was failing to cultivate literacy in students because it had mostly jettisoned, according to him, any emphasis on content and instead chose to focus on formal, content-free skills, a pedagogical philosophy Hirsch calls "educational formalism." Today, you can grasp that phenomenon when you hear educators in the humanities—history, literature, modern languages, etc.--say they are not teaching a specific content (e.g. Roman political history, the poetry of Lord Byron, Italian culture) but a skill, something referred to with the one-size-fits-all phrase "critical thinking."
For Hirsch, cultural literacy is not a skill, and emphatically so, but a baseline level of actual, useful common knowledge that constitutes a field of shared meaning required for effective communication, reading, and writing. He uses the term "schema" to refer to the illuminating network of information that works together to make a person literate--i.e., the pre-reading required to read, say, a literate article: e.g. an article in the Financial Times or The Economist, an op-ed piece by a statesman in The New York Times, a travelogue in National Geographic, etc.
The crux of his argument is that literacy is not only a skill but is built upon a foundation of knowledge. There are certain things people need to know in order to claim literacy. What is the significance of the year 1066? Who is Henry IV? What is the Protestant Reformation? Who is Abraham Lincoln? What was the Alamo? Who was Achilles? What is the significance of his heel? How is the Ark of the Covenant different from Noah's Ark? What happened at the Battle of Waterloo? Who is Faust? It goes on and on.
His point is that in order to pick up, read, and make sense of information-rich writing, you need a baseline of knowledge that is unconsciously contextualizing and framing your efforts at making meaning.
This might sound strange, but anyone who is currently teaching in higher education can agree that certain gaps in knowledge are becoming apparent, particularly in the Pandemic generation. For example, I wanted to test Hirsch's argument, to see where my knowledge and my students' (Freshmen/Sophomores in college) knowledge were at odds. What was I assuming they knew that, in fact, they did not know?
Here are some examples of the questions I asked them:
I asked, "What literary character comes to mind when I mention the Prince of Denmark?" None of them said Hamlet. I asked them where the Civil War ended--at what famous site? None of them could say Appomattox Court House, and one student said the Alamo. I asked them to name a novel by Charles Dickens other than A Christmas Carol. They couldn’t. I asked them to name a single Russian novelist. One student said Marx.
I teach at a liberal-arts school that understands itself as highly selective. I do believe Hirsch's points, which seemed like they were conservative back in the 80s, will return soon. We have a serious problem: we can no longer assume that there exists an intellectual commons, a zone of shared knowledge that we can presume our interlocutors know about.
Hirsch's argument is essentially that education (in the mid-80s) was failing to cultivate literacy in students because it had mostly jettisoned, according to him, any emphasis on content and instead chose to focus on formal, content-free skills, a pedagogical philosophy Hirsch calls "educational formalism." Today, you can grasp that phenomenon when you hear educators in the humanities—history, literature, modern languages, etc.--say they are not teaching a specific content (e.g. Roman political history, the poetry of Lord Byron, Italian culture) but a skill, something referred to with the one-size-fits-all phrase "critical thinking."
For Hirsch, cultural literacy is not a skill, and emphatically so, but a baseline level of actual, useful common knowledge that constitutes a field of shared meaning required for effective communication, reading, and writing. He uses the term "schema" to refer to the illuminating network of information that works together to make a person literate--i.e., the pre-reading required to read, say, a literate article: e.g. an article in the Financial Times or The Economist, an op-ed piece by a statesman in The New York Times, a travelogue in National Geographic, etc.
The crux of his argument is that literacy is not only a skill but is built upon a foundation of knowledge. There are certain things people need to know in order to claim literacy. What is the significance of the year 1066? Who is Henry IV? What is the Protestant Reformation? Who is Abraham Lincoln? What was the Alamo? Who was Achilles? What is the significance of his heel? How is the Ark of the Covenant different from Noah's Ark? What happened at the Battle of Waterloo? Who is Faust? It goes on and on.
His point is that in order to pick up, read, and make sense of information-rich writing, you need a baseline of knowledge that is unconsciously contextualizing and framing your efforts at making meaning.
This might sound strange, but anyone who is currently teaching in higher education can agree that certain gaps in knowledge are becoming apparent, particularly in the Pandemic generation. For example, I wanted to test Hirsch's argument, to see where my knowledge and my students' (Freshmen/Sophomores in college) knowledge were at odds. What was I assuming they knew that, in fact, they did not know?
Here are some examples of the questions I asked them:
I asked, "What literary character comes to mind when I mention the Prince of Denmark?" None of them said Hamlet. I asked them where the Civil War ended--at what famous site? None of them could say Appomattox Court House, and one student said the Alamo. I asked them to name a novel by Charles Dickens other than A Christmas Carol. They couldn’t. I asked them to name a single Russian novelist. One student said Marx.
I teach at a liberal-arts school that understands itself as highly selective. I do believe Hirsch's points, which seemed like they were conservative back in the 80s, will return soon. We have a serious problem: we can no longer assume that there exists an intellectual commons, a zone of shared knowledge that we can presume our interlocutors know about.
February 17, 2014
This text left me nodding vigorously at some sections and wanting to rip out the pages of other portions. Hirsch gives an impressively extensive background of the establishment of the English language. When my students ask, "Who made these grammar rules and spelling decisions?" I can now give them quite a long answer. I love a book that makes me think, and as an educator, this text truly made me ponder my beliefs about education. Hirsch contends that literate adults know things that illiterate adults do not. They have cultural literacy, and there are common ideas, phrases, and words that literate share that allow them to hold intelligent discussions and read newspapers. I agree with this notion, and Hirsch proves it well.
He then continues by arguing that teaching skills is not enough, and we need our children to learn these extensive facts in order for them to become functioning, literate adults. My biggest problem with this idea is his list. The appendix contains 5,000 words and phrases (about half of the book). If we spent time teaching from this list, our students would suffer. School wouldn't be about inquiry---but about facts and cold information. I am more aligned with Dewey's approach. Our students must be given exploratory opportunities to enact inquisition. If we teach our students to be curious, they will want to read and learn, and then they will slowly learn these words and phrases. I imagine educators agreeing with this text and wanting to create multiple choice tests.
My other issue with this text is the fact that Hirsch is narcissistic enough to think that he can create the list of the words and phrases a cultured, literate American should know. He tries to validate this by arguing that he worked with a few others and they received feedback from over a hundred people. I was not impressed and found this to be quite pompous.
He ends with practical ways we might approach the integration of these words and phrases into curricula. I was extremely unhappy with his suggestion to provide a test for students at different levels to ensure that they are learning the facts. More tests? We would kill the love of learning with his approach to education.
While there are elements of Hirsch's argument that are sound and true, I was disappointed by many of the ideas he put forth. I agree that students need to become culturally literate, and I found this concept to be quite interesting and important, but I don't think that all educators will agree about which facts are most important. Hirsch does seem to understand this and explains how the process of picking these words and phrases is messy, and for me, the creation of this list is where many of the details of his argument are flawed.
He begins his book by explaining how saddened he is that a literary reference ("The tide falls") is lost on many people. I understand this allusion, and I disagree with Hirsch. If I used this phrase in a conversation and another person didn't understand it, I would explain it. That is the power of education and teaching each other. We are always learning, and we can always grow as cultured, literate adults. Knowing these specific 5,000 terms (or the many more his more extensive version) do not make us culturally literate.
Are you culturally literate? I included a few random words/phrases you should know from the "5,000 Essential Names, Phrases, Dates, and Concepts" section:
Luxembourg
metaphysics
microfiche
The Little Red Hen (title)
Interstate Commerce Commission
hubris
L'état c'est moi
Dolley Madison
Planck's constant
philistinism
wildcat strike
Benedict Arnold
MX missile
juvenilia
intransitive verb
How did you do? Did you get a few?
He then continues by arguing that teaching skills is not enough, and we need our children to learn these extensive facts in order for them to become functioning, literate adults. My biggest problem with this idea is his list. The appendix contains 5,000 words and phrases (about half of the book). If we spent time teaching from this list, our students would suffer. School wouldn't be about inquiry---but about facts and cold information. I am more aligned with Dewey's approach. Our students must be given exploratory opportunities to enact inquisition. If we teach our students to be curious, they will want to read and learn, and then they will slowly learn these words and phrases. I imagine educators agreeing with this text and wanting to create multiple choice tests.
My other issue with this text is the fact that Hirsch is narcissistic enough to think that he can create the list of the words and phrases a cultured, literate American should know. He tries to validate this by arguing that he worked with a few others and they received feedback from over a hundred people. I was not impressed and found this to be quite pompous.
He ends with practical ways we might approach the integration of these words and phrases into curricula. I was extremely unhappy with his suggestion to provide a test for students at different levels to ensure that they are learning the facts. More tests? We would kill the love of learning with his approach to education.
While there are elements of Hirsch's argument that are sound and true, I was disappointed by many of the ideas he put forth. I agree that students need to become culturally literate, and I found this concept to be quite interesting and important, but I don't think that all educators will agree about which facts are most important. Hirsch does seem to understand this and explains how the process of picking these words and phrases is messy, and for me, the creation of this list is where many of the details of his argument are flawed.
He begins his book by explaining how saddened he is that a literary reference ("The tide falls") is lost on many people. I understand this allusion, and I disagree with Hirsch. If I used this phrase in a conversation and another person didn't understand it, I would explain it. That is the power of education and teaching each other. We are always learning, and we can always grow as cultured, literate adults. Knowing these specific 5,000 terms (or the many more his more extensive version) do not make us culturally literate.
Are you culturally literate? I included a few random words/phrases you should know from the "5,000 Essential Names, Phrases, Dates, and Concepts" section:
Luxembourg
metaphysics
microfiche
The Little Red Hen (title)
Interstate Commerce Commission
hubris
L'état c'est moi
Dolley Madison
Planck's constant
philistinism
wildcat strike
Benedict Arnold
MX missile
juvenilia
intransitive verb
How did you do? Did you get a few?
May 6, 2024
A really fascinating read on why a traditional education is important for effective communication and the endurance of democracy.
August 10, 2017
Hirsch is really hung up on making cultural literacy a partisan issue (80s culture wars?). Also, his assertion that one can become fully culturally literate by learning and comprehending just current mainstream culture seems woefully ignorant and willfully suppressive of multicultural America. This does a major disservice not only to women and people of color, but to the white males who benefit from this narrative.
His scientific and historical reportage are where this book shines. It's a shame that it's mired with his bitter political commentary and perpetuation of white nationalist narrative. A truly odd read that can alternate by paragraph from objective findings of the how literacy or illiteracy affects the individual & groups as a whole; to narrow-minded and generalized interpretation & offerings as how to how to increase literacy & what information is needed and when to be a fully culturally literate person.
Hirsch emphasizes the need for a good comprehension of mainstream culture, without addressing how his concept of "mainstream" is male-dominant, Eurocentric, and that that is problematic for attaining widespread literacy across populations. Perhaps there exists later, updated versions of his canon where this major problem is addressed. He does admit that contemporary language and culture are constantly evolving with antiquated details fading to the background as new concepts emerge, so it's not beyond reason that he could expand his criteria for what makes a person fully culturally literate. I also appreciated his acknowledgement that children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive at school age without necessary knowledge to learn at the established pace and that this problem snowballs as the child ages. However, he does not look deeper into why this might be or how it can be prevented, only peripherally corrected.
If anything, this outdated book offers a good conversation piece, and starting point for a more evolved concept of cultural literacy in today's world.
His scientific and historical reportage are where this book shines. It's a shame that it's mired with his bitter political commentary and perpetuation of white nationalist narrative. A truly odd read that can alternate by paragraph from objective findings of the how literacy or illiteracy affects the individual & groups as a whole; to narrow-minded and generalized interpretation & offerings as how to how to increase literacy & what information is needed and when to be a fully culturally literate person.
Hirsch emphasizes the need for a good comprehension of mainstream culture, without addressing how his concept of "mainstream" is male-dominant, Eurocentric, and that that is problematic for attaining widespread literacy across populations. Perhaps there exists later, updated versions of his canon where this major problem is addressed. He does admit that contemporary language and culture are constantly evolving with antiquated details fading to the background as new concepts emerge, so it's not beyond reason that he could expand his criteria for what makes a person fully culturally literate. I also appreciated his acknowledgement that children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive at school age without necessary knowledge to learn at the established pace and that this problem snowballs as the child ages. However, he does not look deeper into why this might be or how it can be prevented, only peripherally corrected.
If anything, this outdated book offers a good conversation piece, and starting point for a more evolved concept of cultural literacy in today's world.
February 5, 2024
Uitstekende visie op hoe onderwijs ingericht moet worden.
Kort samengevat: Hirsch vindt dat scholen te veel aandacht geven aan vaardigheden en te weinig aan kennis. Te veel 'hoe je moet denken' en te weinig 'wat je moet weten'. Om deel te kunnen nemen aan een democratische samenleving die gebaseerd is op geschreven communicatie is het noodzaak om de culturele consensus te begrijpen waarop die gebaseerd is. Als het onderwijs deze taak niet op zich neemt, blijft deze kernvaardigheid beperkt tot personen met een bevoorrechte achtergrond (waarin deze culturele consensus sowieso al meegegeven wordt).
Hirsch noemt dit concept 'cultural literacy', ik zou zo niet weten hoe je dit in het Nederlands kunt vertalen. Culturele leesvaardigheid? Het is echter wel breder dan lezen alleen.
Ik ben het met sommige critici eens dat de appendix met de lijst van wat iedere Amerikaan moet weten, afbreuk doet aan de bruikbaarheid van dit boek. Sowieso is de zeer sterke kernboodschap van het boek nogal dik ingepakt in de context van de VS in de jaren '80. Ik zou daarom erg benieuwd zijn of deze gedachte al is vertaald naar Nederland, en hoe de uitwerking ervan eruit zou zien? Is wellicht de Canon een voorbeeld hiervan?
Kort samengevat: Hirsch vindt dat scholen te veel aandacht geven aan vaardigheden en te weinig aan kennis. Te veel 'hoe je moet denken' en te weinig 'wat je moet weten'. Om deel te kunnen nemen aan een democratische samenleving die gebaseerd is op geschreven communicatie is het noodzaak om de culturele consensus te begrijpen waarop die gebaseerd is. Als het onderwijs deze taak niet op zich neemt, blijft deze kernvaardigheid beperkt tot personen met een bevoorrechte achtergrond (waarin deze culturele consensus sowieso al meegegeven wordt).
Hirsch noemt dit concept 'cultural literacy', ik zou zo niet weten hoe je dit in het Nederlands kunt vertalen. Culturele leesvaardigheid? Het is echter wel breder dan lezen alleen.
Ik ben het met sommige critici eens dat de appendix met de lijst van wat iedere Amerikaan moet weten, afbreuk doet aan de bruikbaarheid van dit boek. Sowieso is de zeer sterke kernboodschap van het boek nogal dik ingepakt in de context van de VS in de jaren '80. Ik zou daarom erg benieuwd zijn of deze gedachte al is vertaald naar Nederland, en hoe de uitwerking ervan eruit zou zien? Is wellicht de Canon een voorbeeld hiervan?
January 4, 2013
Interesting idea, but really boring. The only part I liked was the list at the end of all the things that all Americans should be able to recognize.
March 23, 2023
The book that started Hirsch’s career. It should have transforms American education from the on. Crossing my fingers it still will.
June 20, 2010
Just finished re-reading this 1988 book, which has become something of a classic of the educational policy debate. I'm always intrigued by canon-building and personally think there is plenty to be said in favor of some subset of the public school curriculum being nationally agreed upon. This is an idea that has somehow become the property of conservatives, who are faced with a balancing act between wanting to mandate a shared body of knowledge and supporting local (i.e. not federal) control of schools. Hirsch is not particularly polemical in his writing in this book; a brief nod to the "culture wars" appears in a sentence like this, "Although our public schools have a duty to teach widely accepted cultural values, they have a duty not to take political stands on matters that are subjects of continuing debate", which is all very well until you realize that for some people, the question of whether the earth is more than 6,000 years old is a subject of continuing debate.
November 4, 2009
If I could give this book negative stars - I would. This was one of the most classist, eurocentric, sexist books on education I've read. And yet the author was filled with self admiration and a very inflated ego in regards to how he believed he'd figured out the literal set of distinct things that makes a person "literate". Seriously such a terrible book I listed it because its remained on my book shelf as an example of what total trash is.
April 22, 2008
Hirsch can kiss my a$$, as can anyone else who has ridiculously conservative (and uninformed!)ideas about turning our public education classrooms into corporate machines. That said, I feel it's important to always know what "the other side" is up to, and that was my main focus when reading this literary gem.
October 9, 2023
Last year I read William Poundstone’s Head in the Clouds, the underlying thesis of which is that even though 99% of all knowledge accrued by man is now accessible within seconds to anyone with a smartphone, it’s still important to… well, actually know stuff.
Central to this is the concept of “Cultural Literacy”, something many of us might call world knowledge. It’s the idea that a truly literate society must share a general knowledge; background information that “enables us to pick up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension”. It also allows for citizens with different backgrounds and professional specialties to engage with each other in a more than cursory way. I think we’d all agree that it would be difficult (or at least tiresome) to have a conversation with an individual who had never heard of Shakespeare or wasn’t able to name the capital city of their own country.
I read Hirsch’s initial 1983 paper on the topic and decided to move on to this popular book where the author had the space to expand on his theory and ideas.
Much (too much?) of the book is given to research on memory. Interesting, but not the reason I decided to buy the book. Hirsch further lost me in the chapters in which he became prescriptive with policy advice. After all, it was originally published in 1987. If action was going to be taken, they would have been taken by now, right? I was a bit surprised that Hirsch is staunchly against the adoption of a second official language in America: “tolerance of diversity is at the root of our society, but encouragement of multilingualism is contrary to our traditions and extremely unrealistic… well-meaning bilingualism could unwittingly erect serious barriers to cultural literacy among our young people and therefore create serious barriers to universal literacy at a mature level.”. I don’t think I can really agree with Hirsch here. Of the current woes of the American education system, multilingualism is not one I would suspect of being all that malevolent.
I admit that I ordered the book in large part to quiz myself on the 5000 snippets of information that Hirsch deems essential for “literate Americans”. I honestly didn’t fare as well as I expected. And therein lies the chief shortcoming of this theory. Who decides what cultural nuggets are so important that they should become part of the shared “general knowledge”?
Central to this is the concept of “Cultural Literacy”, something many of us might call world knowledge. It’s the idea that a truly literate society must share a general knowledge; background information that “enables us to pick up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension”. It also allows for citizens with different backgrounds and professional specialties to engage with each other in a more than cursory way. I think we’d all agree that it would be difficult (or at least tiresome) to have a conversation with an individual who had never heard of Shakespeare or wasn’t able to name the capital city of their own country.
I read Hirsch’s initial 1983 paper on the topic and decided to move on to this popular book where the author had the space to expand on his theory and ideas.
Much (too much?) of the book is given to research on memory. Interesting, but not the reason I decided to buy the book. Hirsch further lost me in the chapters in which he became prescriptive with policy advice. After all, it was originally published in 1987. If action was going to be taken, they would have been taken by now, right? I was a bit surprised that Hirsch is staunchly against the adoption of a second official language in America: “tolerance of diversity is at the root of our society, but encouragement of multilingualism is contrary to our traditions and extremely unrealistic… well-meaning bilingualism could unwittingly erect serious barriers to cultural literacy among our young people and therefore create serious barriers to universal literacy at a mature level.”. I don’t think I can really agree with Hirsch here. Of the current woes of the American education system, multilingualism is not one I would suspect of being all that malevolent.
I admit that I ordered the book in large part to quiz myself on the 5000 snippets of information that Hirsch deems essential for “literate Americans”. I honestly didn’t fare as well as I expected. And therein lies the chief shortcoming of this theory. Who decides what cultural nuggets are so important that they should become part of the shared “general knowledge”?
August 6, 2025
I hate feeling like I'm trudging through a book, waiting for it to end, but that's how this felt. The premise was interesting. The author was able to show how those who are deprived of mainstream American culture (such as those in the lowest socioeconomic class) are unable to keep up with the reading level of their peers because they are not familiar with the same underlying concepts. Authors and writers of every pedigree assume a certain level of underlying knowledge from their readers--but that knowledge is completely lacking in some undereducated people. Therefore, the author asserts that we should prioritize fixing this, and thus attaining a kind of cultural literacy.
The problem was that he kept reasserting the same point over and over and over, as if he had nothing else to say. I kept reading, and at the very end, there were some interesting points to be made about the influence of John Dewey on creating a utilitarian, skills-based educational system, which was quite interesting. It was just painful to get there. It was a book that felt like it could and should have been a lot shorter.
The problem was that he kept reasserting the same point over and over and over, as if he had nothing else to say. I kept reading, and at the very end, there were some interesting points to be made about the influence of John Dewey on creating a utilitarian, skills-based educational system, which was quite interesting. It was just painful to get there. It was a book that felt like it could and should have been a lot shorter.
March 11, 2025
Interesting corollary to what I've learned about Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy and how to apply it. Strengthens and proves the importance of Mason's ideas that children should be fed on living ideas - a feast of living ideas that the child's mind can digest. Through the reading of living books, the child will form connections - the science of relations - and grow in the knowledge of God, man, and the world. As opposed to modernist educational philosophy, including neo-classical thought, that content is secondary, if anything, to processes and "the ability to think", cultural literacy and Mason insist on content being crucial to the development of the person. To order our affections to love that which is lovely, our education should focus on the true, the good, and the beautiful. This book is a great way to apply Mason's British, turn-of-the-century insights to 21st century American education. Although, it must be said - the list of "What Literate Americans Need to Know" is woefully missing culturally significant dates, concepts, people, and events related to Christianity. Ours is a Christian culture founded on the works of Western Civilization which is Christendom. True our current post Modern culture would prefer this weren't so, and the public schools would be censored from teaching certain things, but the current cultural climate and anti-Constitutional viewpoint that relativism is the only approved dogma for our schools should not preclude these items from such a list. It would have been more authentic and braver to include them.
October 14, 2018
Objective Summary
Hirsch argues for American educators to return to a focus on cultural literacy, meaning a common body of knowledge that literate citizens within a nation possess. Mere literacy, the ability to sound out or read individual words, is not coterminous with cultural literacy, which is a deeper familiarity with a body of concepts shared by one’s compatriots. Cultural literacy is essential to efficient and effective communication. It is a prerequisite for general readers to grasp material written in newspapers, magazines, and literature. For example, community college students struggled with a short article describing the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox. The description of this event assumed familiarity that the students did not have with the Civil War, the Union, the Confederacy, General Ulysses S. Grant, and General Robert E. Lee. Exhaustive understanding of each term is not required. But a basic sketch, or schemata, of who the relevant players, issues, and events were, and how they fit together, was required to understand that particular article and nearly all others. If every term had to be defined in every piece of writing, all writing would be unwieldy. Writers assume a general level of understanding from readers. When readers lack the assumed level of understanding, they are either less likely to read at all, or each undertaking will be a tedious struggle with much information lost in the process. Short term memory fails after about seven seconds or seven items. Precise forms are lost quickly, but the gist of an idea can be retained much longer. When basic facts are converted to long-term memory, they can be called upon to inform reading.
The precise terms that comprise cultural literacy will vary between nations and change over time. Some terms will succumb to obsolescence (Harold Ickes) and others will impose themselves through technology (google, Amazon) and world events (9/11). Core terms endure. Terms culturally literate Americans know include: 1492, Shakespeare, Declaration of Independence, George Washington, Bill of Rights, Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War, World Wars I and II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Brown v. Board of Education. There are, of course, many others. Hirsch provides a list of 5,000 “essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts.” He recognizes that the terms will and should change over time, but he insists that a core list like his needs to exist for the benefit of all citizens.
Hirsch argues that public education in the U.S. took the significance of cultural literacy for granted from 1790 through 1900. Students across the nation were inculcated with nearly identical information and values. The theories of education shifted around 1918. The theories and idealism of Dewey, Rousseau, and Wordsworth pushed an individual growth model and formalism for fundamental processing like “linguistic skills” without regard to content. The theory was it didn’t matter what students read because they all had different abilities, talents, and interests. Moreover, with a rapidly changing economy, it was silly to train all children identically. All that mattered is that they read something. Traditional curricula were under further assault from multiculturalism and progressives who objected to the focus on white, European, male ideas and events. Such focus disadvantaged minorities and excluded other, valuable insights and histories.
Hirsch calls for a return to cultural literacy. A lack of cultural literacy hobbles an individual and a society. It leads to inefficiency and confusion at best, and balkanization and antagonism at worst. An individual may be excluded from a job or an entire field. A society may be thrust into war. Young children are sponges of knowledge. The process of conveying basic facts of their culture is both enjoyable for most kids and comes easily. These building blocks of knowledge pay huge dividends over the course of the child’s life because he is then able to use his cultural literacy to more ably grapple with future readings. The positive snowball effect inures to the benefit of all. Cultural literacy, though it has traditional facts and elements, is progressive and democratic in that everyone has access to it. It is much easier for an impoverished child or new immigrant to learn information in several hundred pages of material than try to equalize generations of wealth, connections, and schooling. If the curricula across schools vary widely, those in poor districts are more disadvantaged than if there is a common curriculum and all students learn the same fundamental facts. Cultural literacy is simply the shared language through which new ideas can arise and spread. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, explicitly drew upon his cultural literacy from the Bible and founding documents to make his case and convince America of the justice of civil rights. And nothing stops minorities from contributing to the list of cultural literacy themselves, as King, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and jazz demonstrate.
Hirsch suggests that education in the U.S. should have both extensive and intensive curricula. All students would be exposed to the extensive curriculum that would inculcate cultural literacy. They could also choose to study fewer topics of their choice in more depth. This system would give students the best of both worlds: general knowledge and specialization.
Subjective Thoughts
Hirsch’s arguments convince me. A shared language and cultural would naturally increase efficiency. A move away from significant facts and history seems self-evidently detrimental the functioning and unity of a society. Though Hirsch provides only an index of terms here, he stated he will publish a dictionary of cultural literacy at a later date. I would like to possess such a book, or the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge. Works like that contain interesting information and grant me entry into the priesthood of the cultural literate. All things considered, it’s actually a pretty low price of admission.
Revealing Quotes
“Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.”
“Our traditional social goals were unforgettably renewed for us by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech. King envisioned a country where the children of former slaves sit down at the table of equality with the children of former slave owners, where men and women deal with each other as equals and judge each other on their characters and achievements rather than their origins. Like Thomas Jefferson, he had a dream of a society founded not on race or class but on personal merit.”
“The civic importance of cultural literacy lies in the fact that true enfranchisement depends upon knowledge, knowledge upon literacy, and literacy upon cultural literacy. To be truly literate, citizens must be able to grasp the meaning of any piece of writing addressed to the general reader.”
“[A] mastery of national culture is essential to mastery of the standard language in every modern nation.”
“[Multiculturalism] should not be the primary focus of national education. It should not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools’ responsibility to ensure our children’s mastery of American literate culture. The acculturative responsibility of the schools is primary and fundamental. To teach the ways of one’s own community has always been and still remains the essence of the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture nor a transcendent world culture but a national literate culture.”
“Many items of literate culture are arbitrary, but that does not make them dispensable. Facts are essential components of the basic skills that a child entering a culture must have.”
“AI research shows that experts perform better than novices not because they have more powerful and better oiled intellectual machinery but because they have more relevant and quickly available information. What distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of diverse, task-specific information.”
“How large is the ‘large number of schemata’ that skilled persons have acquired? It has been estimated that a chess master can recognize about 50,000 positions patterns. Interestingly, that is the approximate number of words and idioms in the vocabulary of a literate person.”
“In a study of American school materials of the nineteenth century, Ruth Miller Elson found an almost complete unanimity of values and emphases in our schoolbooks from 1790 to 1900. They consistently contrasted virtuous and natural Americans with corrupt and decadent Europeans; they unanimously stressed love of country, love of God, obedience to parents, thrift, honesty, and hard work; and they continually insisted upon the perfection of the United States, the guardian of liberty and the destined redeemer of a sinful Europe.”
“George [Washington], said his father, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden? This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” – apocryphal cherry-tree story from Mason Weems’s biography of George Washington
“Abraham Lincoln relates in his Autobiography how he educated himself by carefully reading and rereading a few books . . . Weems’s Life of Washington, the Bible, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . . Paine’s Age of Reason, and Volney’s Ruins.”
“Linguistic pluralism would make sense for us only on the questionable assumption that our civil peace and national effectiveness could survive multilingualism. But in fact, multilingualism enormously increases cultural fragmentation, civil antagonism, illiteracy, and economic-technological ineffectualness. These are the very disabilities the Chinese are attempting to overcome.”
“The poorest man may in his cottage
bid defiance to all the force of the Crown.
It may be frail;
its roof may shake;
the wind may blow through it;
the storms may enter,
the rain may enter,—
but the King of England cannot enter.” – William Pitt the Elder
“How such fragmentation [of American education] arose can be grasped in broad terms by looking at two decisive moments in American education represented by two historic documents, one published in 1893, the other in 1918. The earlier one is the Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies; the later report is Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. The contrasts between them bring into clear relief the change in educational theory that occurred in the first quarter of this century.”
“[T]he information that literate people dependably share is extensive but limited.”
“One can think of the school curriculum as consisting of two complementary parts, which might be called the extensive curriculum and the intensive curriculum. The content of the extensive curriculum is traditional literate knowledge, the information, the attitudes, and assumptions that literate Americans share—cultural literacy. . . . The intensive curriculum, though different, is equally essential. Intensive study encourages a fully developed understanding of a subject, making one’s knowledge of it integrated and coherent.”
“Many a proverb has its opposite in the national vocabulary, so that often one discovers dueling platitudes. Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but many hands make light work. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind. You’re never too old to learn, unless you happen to be an old dog trying to learn new tricks.”
“What practical measures could be taken to create useful school materials? The single most effective step would be to shift the reading materials used in kindergarten through eighth grade to a much stronger base in factual information and traditional lore.”
Hirsch argues for American educators to return to a focus on cultural literacy, meaning a common body of knowledge that literate citizens within a nation possess. Mere literacy, the ability to sound out or read individual words, is not coterminous with cultural literacy, which is a deeper familiarity with a body of concepts shared by one’s compatriots. Cultural literacy is essential to efficient and effective communication. It is a prerequisite for general readers to grasp material written in newspapers, magazines, and literature. For example, community college students struggled with a short article describing the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox. The description of this event assumed familiarity that the students did not have with the Civil War, the Union, the Confederacy, General Ulysses S. Grant, and General Robert E. Lee. Exhaustive understanding of each term is not required. But a basic sketch, or schemata, of who the relevant players, issues, and events were, and how they fit together, was required to understand that particular article and nearly all others. If every term had to be defined in every piece of writing, all writing would be unwieldy. Writers assume a general level of understanding from readers. When readers lack the assumed level of understanding, they are either less likely to read at all, or each undertaking will be a tedious struggle with much information lost in the process. Short term memory fails after about seven seconds or seven items. Precise forms are lost quickly, but the gist of an idea can be retained much longer. When basic facts are converted to long-term memory, they can be called upon to inform reading.
The precise terms that comprise cultural literacy will vary between nations and change over time. Some terms will succumb to obsolescence (Harold Ickes) and others will impose themselves through technology (google, Amazon) and world events (9/11). Core terms endure. Terms culturally literate Americans know include: 1492, Shakespeare, Declaration of Independence, George Washington, Bill of Rights, Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Emancipation Proclamation, Civil War, World Wars I and II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Brown v. Board of Education. There are, of course, many others. Hirsch provides a list of 5,000 “essential names, phrases, dates, and concepts.” He recognizes that the terms will and should change over time, but he insists that a core list like his needs to exist for the benefit of all citizens.
Hirsch argues that public education in the U.S. took the significance of cultural literacy for granted from 1790 through 1900. Students across the nation were inculcated with nearly identical information and values. The theories of education shifted around 1918. The theories and idealism of Dewey, Rousseau, and Wordsworth pushed an individual growth model and formalism for fundamental processing like “linguistic skills” without regard to content. The theory was it didn’t matter what students read because they all had different abilities, talents, and interests. Moreover, with a rapidly changing economy, it was silly to train all children identically. All that mattered is that they read something. Traditional curricula were under further assault from multiculturalism and progressives who objected to the focus on white, European, male ideas and events. Such focus disadvantaged minorities and excluded other, valuable insights and histories.
Hirsch calls for a return to cultural literacy. A lack of cultural literacy hobbles an individual and a society. It leads to inefficiency and confusion at best, and balkanization and antagonism at worst. An individual may be excluded from a job or an entire field. A society may be thrust into war. Young children are sponges of knowledge. The process of conveying basic facts of their culture is both enjoyable for most kids and comes easily. These building blocks of knowledge pay huge dividends over the course of the child’s life because he is then able to use his cultural literacy to more ably grapple with future readings. The positive snowball effect inures to the benefit of all. Cultural literacy, though it has traditional facts and elements, is progressive and democratic in that everyone has access to it. It is much easier for an impoverished child or new immigrant to learn information in several hundred pages of material than try to equalize generations of wealth, connections, and schooling. If the curricula across schools vary widely, those in poor districts are more disadvantaged than if there is a common curriculum and all students learn the same fundamental facts. Cultural literacy is simply the shared language through which new ideas can arise and spread. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, explicitly drew upon his cultural literacy from the Bible and founding documents to make his case and convince America of the justice of civil rights. And nothing stops minorities from contributing to the list of cultural literacy themselves, as King, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and jazz demonstrate.
Hirsch suggests that education in the U.S. should have both extensive and intensive curricula. All students would be exposed to the extensive curriculum that would inculcate cultural literacy. They could also choose to study fewer topics of their choice in more depth. This system would give students the best of both worlds: general knowledge and specialization.
Subjective Thoughts
Hirsch’s arguments convince me. A shared language and cultural would naturally increase efficiency. A move away from significant facts and history seems self-evidently detrimental the functioning and unity of a society. Though Hirsch provides only an index of terms here, he stated he will publish a dictionary of cultural literacy at a later date. I would like to possess such a book, or the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge. Works like that contain interesting information and grant me entry into the priesthood of the cultural literate. All things considered, it’s actually a pretty low price of admission.
Revealing Quotes
“Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.”
“Our traditional social goals were unforgettably renewed for us by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech. King envisioned a country where the children of former slaves sit down at the table of equality with the children of former slave owners, where men and women deal with each other as equals and judge each other on their characters and achievements rather than their origins. Like Thomas Jefferson, he had a dream of a society founded not on race or class but on personal merit.”
“The civic importance of cultural literacy lies in the fact that true enfranchisement depends upon knowledge, knowledge upon literacy, and literacy upon cultural literacy. To be truly literate, citizens must be able to grasp the meaning of any piece of writing addressed to the general reader.”
“[A] mastery of national culture is essential to mastery of the standard language in every modern nation.”
“[Multiculturalism] should not be the primary focus of national education. It should not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools’ responsibility to ensure our children’s mastery of American literate culture. The acculturative responsibility of the schools is primary and fundamental. To teach the ways of one’s own community has always been and still remains the essence of the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture nor a transcendent world culture but a national literate culture.”
“Many items of literate culture are arbitrary, but that does not make them dispensable. Facts are essential components of the basic skills that a child entering a culture must have.”
“AI research shows that experts perform better than novices not because they have more powerful and better oiled intellectual machinery but because they have more relevant and quickly available information. What distinguishes good readers from poor ones is simply the possession of a lot of diverse, task-specific information.”
“How large is the ‘large number of schemata’ that skilled persons have acquired? It has been estimated that a chess master can recognize about 50,000 positions patterns. Interestingly, that is the approximate number of words and idioms in the vocabulary of a literate person.”
“In a study of American school materials of the nineteenth century, Ruth Miller Elson found an almost complete unanimity of values and emphases in our schoolbooks from 1790 to 1900. They consistently contrasted virtuous and natural Americans with corrupt and decadent Europeans; they unanimously stressed love of country, love of God, obedience to parents, thrift, honesty, and hard work; and they continually insisted upon the perfection of the United States, the guardian of liberty and the destined redeemer of a sinful Europe.”
“George [Washington], said his father, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry-tree yonder in the garden? This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” – apocryphal cherry-tree story from Mason Weems’s biography of George Washington
“Abraham Lincoln relates in his Autobiography how he educated himself by carefully reading and rereading a few books . . . Weems’s Life of Washington, the Bible, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . . Paine’s Age of Reason, and Volney’s Ruins.”
“Linguistic pluralism would make sense for us only on the questionable assumption that our civil peace and national effectiveness could survive multilingualism. But in fact, multilingualism enormously increases cultural fragmentation, civil antagonism, illiteracy, and economic-technological ineffectualness. These are the very disabilities the Chinese are attempting to overcome.”
“The poorest man may in his cottage
bid defiance to all the force of the Crown.
It may be frail;
its roof may shake;
the wind may blow through it;
the storms may enter,
the rain may enter,—
but the King of England cannot enter.” – William Pitt the Elder
“How such fragmentation [of American education] arose can be grasped in broad terms by looking at two decisive moments in American education represented by two historic documents, one published in 1893, the other in 1918. The earlier one is the Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies; the later report is Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education. The contrasts between them bring into clear relief the change in educational theory that occurred in the first quarter of this century.”
“[T]he information that literate people dependably share is extensive but limited.”
“One can think of the school curriculum as consisting of two complementary parts, which might be called the extensive curriculum and the intensive curriculum. The content of the extensive curriculum is traditional literate knowledge, the information, the attitudes, and assumptions that literate Americans share—cultural literacy. . . . The intensive curriculum, though different, is equally essential. Intensive study encourages a fully developed understanding of a subject, making one’s knowledge of it integrated and coherent.”
“Many a proverb has its opposite in the national vocabulary, so that often one discovers dueling platitudes. Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but many hands make light work. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind. You’re never too old to learn, unless you happen to be an old dog trying to learn new tricks.”
“What practical measures could be taken to create useful school materials? The single most effective step would be to shift the reading materials used in kindergarten through eighth grade to a much stronger base in factual information and traditional lore.”
May 20, 2024
AN INFLUENTIAL (AND CONTROVERSIAL) BOOK
Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. is an American educator, literary critic, and educational theorist. He is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1987 book, “To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science… Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents… Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They CAN break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years… Cultural literacy is represented not by a PRESCRIPTIVE list of books but rather by a DESCRIPTIVE list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans. My aim in this book is to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans.” (Pg.
xiii-xiv)
In the first chapter, he states, “This book explains why we need to make some very specific educational changes in order to achieve a higher level of national literacy… It focuses on what I conceive to be the great hidden problem in American education, and I hope that it reveals this problem so compellingly that anyone who is concerned about American education will be persuaded by the book’s argument and act upon it.” (Pg. 1)
He says, “Although nationalism may be regrettable in some of its worldwide political effects, a mastery of national culture is essential to mastery of the standard language in every modern nation… But however laudable it is, it should not be the primary focus of national education. It should not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools’ responsibility to ensure our children’s master of American literate culture... The acculturative responsibility of the schools is primary and fundamental. To teach the ways of one’s own community has always been and still remains the essence of the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture nor a transcendent world culture but a national literature culture. For profound historical reasons, this is the day of the modern world. It will not change soon, and it will certainly not be changed by educational policy alone.” (Pg. 18)
He observes, “It will not do to blame television for the state of our literacy. Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative. Moreover… the schools themselves must be held partly responsible for excessive television watching, because they have not firmly insisted that students complete significant amounts of homework, an obvious way to increase time spent on reading the writing.” (Pg. 20)
He suggests, “Successful communication depends upon shared associations. To participate in the literate national culture is to have acquired a sense of the information that is shared in that culture. No adult-level discourse retreats to the rudiments of knowledge. If assumptions about rudiments could not be made, ordinary discourse would be so lengthy and intricate as to obscure its own point.” (Pg. 59)
He notes, “The traditional materials of national culture can be learned by all citizens only if the materials are taught in a nation’s schools. But to teach them, the schools must have access to books that explain them… Like everything that helps to spread literature language and culture, a nation’s dictionaries, including those of cultural literacy, have helped to overcome class distinctions and barriers to opportunity. Historically, they have had a liberalizing and democratic effect.” (Pg. 91)
He argues, “well-meaning bilingualism could unwittingly erect serious barriers to cultural literacy among our young people and therefore create serious barriers to universal literacy at a mature level. I am opposed neither to BILITERACY not to the learning of foreign languages. I am strongly in favor of both. In the best of worlds, all Americans would be multiliterate. But surely the first step in that direction must be for all of us to become literate in our own national language and culture.” (Pg. 92)
He explains, “Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture. American national culture is neither coherent nor monolithic, and no convincing attempt fully to define its character has ever appeared… The national culture, as contrasted with the national civil religion, depends on a highly diverse vocabulary of communication rather than a coherent system of fundamental values and principles. Like the bible of the civil religion, the national vocabulary changes with the consent of those who use it, but because of its use in communication, it is fundamentally conservative and its core contents change very slowly.” (Pg. 102)
He points out, “Many Americans who have graduated from high school in the recent past have been deprived of the cultural vocabulary possessed by educated persons in past generation. Some repair work is necessary for them and the or the members of the current school generation. They must be reintroduced to the cultural vocabulary that continues to be the foundation for literate national communication. The new illiteracy is sometimes excused by the argument that our schools are now educating larger portions of our population. The point is that we are NOT educating them. We undertook the great task of universal education precisely in order to produce a truly literate population, but we have not succeeded in that task in recent years. We must assure that new generations will continue to be enfranchised in our medium of national communication as securely as they are enfranchised at the polls.” (Pg. 108)
He states, “The polarization of educationists into facts-people versus skills-people has no basis in reason. Facts and skills are inseparable. There is no insurmountable reason why those who advocate the teaching of common traditional content should not join forces. No philosophical or practical barrier prevents them from doing so, and all who consider mature literacy to be a paramount aim of education will wish them to do so.” (Pg. 133)
He recounts, “Such agreement about literate culture should… enable a random group of literate Americans to compile a list of its core contents… In 1983 I persuaded two of my colleagues at the University of Virginia… to help me compile such a list… Each of us took the primary responsibility for developing the vocabulary within his field… When we finished the first version of the list, we submitted it to more than a hundred consultants outside the academic world… In consulting others about our initial list we did in fact discover a strong consensus about the significant elements in our core literate vocabulary… We do not claim that the initial list is definite… Nonetheless, the consensus we found has made us confident that our list provides a fairly reliable index to the middle-level information that is shared by most literate people but remains largely unfamiliar to most illiterate people.” (Pg. 135-136)
He concludes, “I hope that anyone who has read this book will see that the educational reform it advocates are based upon reason and strong evidence. The reforms are meant to raise the reading level of all students and to break the cycle of illiteracy that persists from parent to child under our current school curriculum… I hope that in our future debates about the extensive curriculum, the participants will keep clearly in view the high stakes involved in their deliberations: breaking the cycle of illiteracy for deprived children; raising the living standard of families who have been illiterate; making our country more competitive in international markets; achieving greater social justice; enabling all citizens to participate in the political process; bringing us closer to the Ciceronian ideal of universal public discourse---in short, achieving fundamental goals of the Founders at the birth of the republic.” (Pg. 143-145)
This book will be great interest to all those interested in the debates about the ‘Western Canon,’ the
‘Great Books,’ and Multiculturalism
Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. is an American educator, literary critic, and educational theorist. He is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1987 book, “To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. The breadth of that information is great, extending over the major domains of human activity from sports to science… Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children, the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents… Some say that our schools by themselves are powerless to change the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. I do not agree. They CAN break the cycle, but only if they themselves break fundamentally with some the theories and practices that education professors and school administrators have followed over the past fifty years… Cultural literacy is represented not by a PRESCRIPTIVE list of books but rather by a DESCRIPTIVE list of the information actually possessed by literate Americans. My aim in this book is to contribute to making that information the possession of all Americans.” (Pg.
xiii-xiv)
In the first chapter, he states, “This book explains why we need to make some very specific educational changes in order to achieve a higher level of national literacy… It focuses on what I conceive to be the great hidden problem in American education, and I hope that it reveals this problem so compellingly that anyone who is concerned about American education will be persuaded by the book’s argument and act upon it.” (Pg. 1)
He says, “Although nationalism may be regrettable in some of its worldwide political effects, a mastery of national culture is essential to mastery of the standard language in every modern nation… But however laudable it is, it should not be the primary focus of national education. It should not be allowed to supplant or interfere with our schools’ responsibility to ensure our children’s master of American literate culture... The acculturative responsibility of the schools is primary and fundamental. To teach the ways of one’s own community has always been and still remains the essence of the education of our children, who enter neither a narrow tribal culture nor a transcendent world culture but a national literature culture. For profound historical reasons, this is the day of the modern world. It will not change soon, and it will certainly not be changed by educational policy alone.” (Pg. 18)
He observes, “It will not do to blame television for the state of our literacy. Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative. Moreover… the schools themselves must be held partly responsible for excessive television watching, because they have not firmly insisted that students complete significant amounts of homework, an obvious way to increase time spent on reading the writing.” (Pg. 20)
He suggests, “Successful communication depends upon shared associations. To participate in the literate national culture is to have acquired a sense of the information that is shared in that culture. No adult-level discourse retreats to the rudiments of knowledge. If assumptions about rudiments could not be made, ordinary discourse would be so lengthy and intricate as to obscure its own point.” (Pg. 59)
He notes, “The traditional materials of national culture can be learned by all citizens only if the materials are taught in a nation’s schools. But to teach them, the schools must have access to books that explain them… Like everything that helps to spread literature language and culture, a nation’s dictionaries, including those of cultural literacy, have helped to overcome class distinctions and barriers to opportunity. Historically, they have had a liberalizing and democratic effect.” (Pg. 91)
He argues, “well-meaning bilingualism could unwittingly erect serious barriers to cultural literacy among our young people and therefore create serious barriers to universal literacy at a mature level. I am opposed neither to BILITERACY not to the learning of foreign languages. I am strongly in favor of both. In the best of worlds, all Americans would be multiliterate. But surely the first step in that direction must be for all of us to become literate in our own national language and culture.” (Pg. 92)
He explains, “Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture. American national culture is neither coherent nor monolithic, and no convincing attempt fully to define its character has ever appeared… The national culture, as contrasted with the national civil religion, depends on a highly diverse vocabulary of communication rather than a coherent system of fundamental values and principles. Like the bible of the civil religion, the national vocabulary changes with the consent of those who use it, but because of its use in communication, it is fundamentally conservative and its core contents change very slowly.” (Pg. 102)
He points out, “Many Americans who have graduated from high school in the recent past have been deprived of the cultural vocabulary possessed by educated persons in past generation. Some repair work is necessary for them and the or the members of the current school generation. They must be reintroduced to the cultural vocabulary that continues to be the foundation for literate national communication. The new illiteracy is sometimes excused by the argument that our schools are now educating larger portions of our population. The point is that we are NOT educating them. We undertook the great task of universal education precisely in order to produce a truly literate population, but we have not succeeded in that task in recent years. We must assure that new generations will continue to be enfranchised in our medium of national communication as securely as they are enfranchised at the polls.” (Pg. 108)
He states, “The polarization of educationists into facts-people versus skills-people has no basis in reason. Facts and skills are inseparable. There is no insurmountable reason why those who advocate the teaching of common traditional content should not join forces. No philosophical or practical barrier prevents them from doing so, and all who consider mature literacy to be a paramount aim of education will wish them to do so.” (Pg. 133)
He recounts, “Such agreement about literate culture should… enable a random group of literate Americans to compile a list of its core contents… In 1983 I persuaded two of my colleagues at the University of Virginia… to help me compile such a list… Each of us took the primary responsibility for developing the vocabulary within his field… When we finished the first version of the list, we submitted it to more than a hundred consultants outside the academic world… In consulting others about our initial list we did in fact discover a strong consensus about the significant elements in our core literate vocabulary… We do not claim that the initial list is definite… Nonetheless, the consensus we found has made us confident that our list provides a fairly reliable index to the middle-level information that is shared by most literate people but remains largely unfamiliar to most illiterate people.” (Pg. 135-136)
He concludes, “I hope that anyone who has read this book will see that the educational reform it advocates are based upon reason and strong evidence. The reforms are meant to raise the reading level of all students and to break the cycle of illiteracy that persists from parent to child under our current school curriculum… I hope that in our future debates about the extensive curriculum, the participants will keep clearly in view the high stakes involved in their deliberations: breaking the cycle of illiteracy for deprived children; raising the living standard of families who have been illiterate; making our country more competitive in international markets; achieving greater social justice; enabling all citizens to participate in the political process; bringing us closer to the Ciceronian ideal of universal public discourse---in short, achieving fundamental goals of the Founders at the birth of the republic.” (Pg. 143-145)
This book will be great interest to all those interested in the debates about the ‘Western Canon,’ the
‘Great Books,’ and Multiculturalism
December 27, 2013
I read this when I was in college because it was written by one of the professors at my school. I think it helped kick off the furor for higher standards and, eventually, a common core. Still, nothing like a common "cultural literary" standard has ever been implemented--i.e. a large, common vocabulary of people, places, concepts, etc. There is a small common vocabulary, however - things you are bound to pick up in 90 percent of schools, but this common cultural vocabulary seems to grow smaller with each passing generation.
I was fairly widely read from a young age, but I recall reading his list in the back of this book of common cultural references (from scientist and writers to battles and theories) everyone should know and finding I didn't know quite a few of them. I remember my father, who as long as I could remember devoured books of all kinds on all subjects, highlighting the things he didn't know well so he could look them up, and he had more highlights than I would have expected. That is to say, while I may agree with Hirsch's general concept that we need more common cultural literacy, the details are where things get hung up. His details may be a bit unrealistic, and educational theorists will always fight over the particulars, and perhaps that is why nothing useful like an information-rich, specific curriculum ever seems to get implemented in education.
I don't think our biggest problems in modern education are class size or funding or the quality of teachers - I think it's curriculum. The curriculum used in most public schools today just isn't very good, and it keeps changing, from one poor curriculum to another. Kids love to learn and memorize at a young age, but we don't really pump their little brains full of as much cultural information as we could, of people and places and epochs and such. Vague standards written up in academic gobbledygook isn't what I mean here - but rather very content-specific curriculum. Have you ever tried reading the description of what your kids will learn in, say, 3rd grade from a public school website? I mean, just tell me, what specific mathematical operations will they learn? What specific historical figures and periods will they learn about? What specific books will they read? No vague generalities about process and standards using academic jargon, please. Tell me the actual STUFF. But finding that information is like pulling teeth.
I was fairly widely read from a young age, but I recall reading his list in the back of this book of common cultural references (from scientist and writers to battles and theories) everyone should know and finding I didn't know quite a few of them. I remember my father, who as long as I could remember devoured books of all kinds on all subjects, highlighting the things he didn't know well so he could look them up, and he had more highlights than I would have expected. That is to say, while I may agree with Hirsch's general concept that we need more common cultural literacy, the details are where things get hung up. His details may be a bit unrealistic, and educational theorists will always fight over the particulars, and perhaps that is why nothing useful like an information-rich, specific curriculum ever seems to get implemented in education.
I don't think our biggest problems in modern education are class size or funding or the quality of teachers - I think it's curriculum. The curriculum used in most public schools today just isn't very good, and it keeps changing, from one poor curriculum to another. Kids love to learn and memorize at a young age, but we don't really pump their little brains full of as much cultural information as we could, of people and places and epochs and such. Vague standards written up in academic gobbledygook isn't what I mean here - but rather very content-specific curriculum. Have you ever tried reading the description of what your kids will learn in, say, 3rd grade from a public school website? I mean, just tell me, what specific mathematical operations will they learn? What specific historical figures and periods will they learn about? What specific books will they read? No vague generalities about process and standards using academic jargon, please. Tell me the actual STUFF. But finding that information is like pulling teeth.
December 10, 2009
To some degree, E. D. Hirsch’s contention that we need a type of “cultural literacy” or common coinage to communicate with one another intelligently—his notion of the liberal arts—is akin to applying a cosmetic. Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams) would have viewed Hirsch's project skeptically. Adams possessed “cultural literacy” in abundance yet he pauses at the end of each chapter in his carefully wrought autobiography, to remark that his education, so far, “was a failure.” What Adams seeks far transcends the simple “stockpile” approach to liberal education. Adams recognizes that cultural literacy must be processed and integrated before it is of any worth. For Henry Adams, education will always be a failure in the sense that it cannot be possessed completely, nor should it.
Hirsch has defined culture as, “the sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is transmitted though language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art, from one generation to the next.” Hirsch goes on to say that “Culture also refers to refined music, art, and literature; one who is well versed in these subjects is considered “cultured.”
The book's appendix provides a 63-page list of items of the names, concepts, phrases, etc., that Hirsch feels every cultured/educated American should know. For example, here’s short excerpt from the “P” list:
Princess and the Pea
the prism
private enterprise
private sector
probate court
probation
procrustean bed
prodigal son
profit sharing
pro forma
prognosis
programming language
progressive education
Hirsch has defined culture as, “the sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is transmitted though language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art, from one generation to the next.” Hirsch goes on to say that “Culture also refers to refined music, art, and literature; one who is well versed in these subjects is considered “cultured.”
The book's appendix provides a 63-page list of items of the names, concepts, phrases, etc., that Hirsch feels every cultured/educated American should know. For example, here’s short excerpt from the “P” list:
Princess and the Pea
the prism
private enterprise
private sector
probate court
probation
procrustean bed
prodigal son
profit sharing
pro forma
prognosis
programming language
progressive education
July 18, 2008
This book is not enjoyable to read. It does have a very interesting thesis. The main idea in the book is that the education in America has changed in the last 100 years and the results are that children today struggle with reading and comprehension. Hirsch cites lots of research to validate his claim that reading and the comprehension associated with it require a certain amount of basic background information. The children with high vocabularies comprehend more of what they read. The vocabulary of literate people is cultural and held in common. It is the stuff everyone ought to know to understand words in our culture. He suggests that Educational policies need to change so that reading is related to information and not just a decoding skill. He has another book out called the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy which is like a dictionary of ideas/facts that literate people share in common in our culture which allow us to communicate with each other.
June 25, 2016
It's really rare that I give a nonfiction book five stars. In this case, I'm doing it because it's one of the few nonfiction books I've read yet that I feel really thoroughly changed my view of a subject. Do I agree with Hirsch 100%? No. Do I think his list is biased? Without question. But I found the theory behind the creation of a list of concepts in a curriculum of cultural literacy absolutely fascinating and in a lot of respects, very persuasive. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in education. It's even more fascinating in light of the recent debates over the Common Core.
January 31, 2021
Other reviewers suggest this is a quick compendium of what any educated American ought to know. It falls into two parts-the text, which agrees with experts from Aristotle to Michelle Obama, that the current generation doesn't know what it should and the world is falling apart and the list of five thousand facts all Americans should know. He credits universities from left and right and perhaps provides a snap shot before the states tore into two. The text is interesting but forgettable. The list is what you should read and talk about over coffee. It is heavy on Shakespeare and classical culture, but light on science. It makes for great coffee talk but has not lasted well.
September 6, 2020
An interesting book that illuminates all that is brought to bear upon the act of reading, comprehension, and, and interpretation.
It also brings to point the importance of a unifying language and shared cultural values and understanding.
The premises of a shared cultural literacy were even then idealistic in the 1980s and seemingly more so in the 21st century, but I think the underlying point about advantages of cultural literacy are still valid even if implementation may not be possible or desirable depending on who you ask.
It also brings to point the importance of a unifying language and shared cultural values and understanding.
The premises of a shared cultural literacy were even then idealistic in the 1980s and seemingly more so in the 21st century, but I think the underlying point about advantages of cultural literacy are still valid even if implementation may not be possible or desirable depending on who you ask.
August 27, 2018
"Cultural Alarmism" is a genre unto itself. "Cultural Literacy" will feel very comfortable sliding in next to Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" on your bookshelf. The argument central to both books is that pop culture is eating us. I agree with the argument, but the result is not the left-wing free-for-all both authors feared. Rather, cultural illiteracy has hollowed out and corrupted the right wing to the point where a reality TV star is its standard-bearer.
February 1, 2010
This book tries to tackle the illiteracy of our nation by claiming that we can't communicate if we don't have a shared core background knowledge - so schools should teach such a knowledge. Having seen high school kids not know things I assumed to be the most basic, fundamental ideas of our society, I do see some merit to this.
July 2, 2008
This book was interesting in theory. But like a lot of "theory" books, difficult to get people to do what is suggested. This goes back to Plato's Republic where the "intelligentsia" was to lead the masses to a Utopian society. Nice thought, difficult to enforce.
January 14, 2009
Useful as a goad to irritation. I enjoyed it but the idea that one person can select things that "EVERY" American needs to know is kind of silly. I did think there were a lot of good points in the book, but a lot of important need to know stuff was left out.
June 7, 2009
This was more in depth than I was looking for, geared more toward professionals working in the field of educaiton. The Cultural Literacy Dictionary gives a summary of this book in the beginning and that was all I really wanted.
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