Can Cultural Literacy be Taught or Tested?

Abstract

he quest for cultural literacy paradoxically demonstrates our best and worst educational instincts. At best, the renewed interest in major facts, people, movements, and ideas suggests that Americans are concerned that our students, our children, do not share a common body of knowledge. At worst, the rising interest is an artificially generated search for demonstrable evidence of what it means to be well educated. Hirsch wants to reestablish a shared set of cultural principles-a noble goal. But I suspect that such a goal will not be reached when parents, teachers, administrators, commission members, or legislators demand the teaching of cultural literacy. Rather, I think, the results will be like those in classes to develop vocabulary, where learning definitions is divorced from the all-important context of reading, writing, and speaking. Just as students can recite definitions of learned vocab-