Critical reflections on Hirsch and cultural literacy

Abstract

Early in his book Cultural Literacy, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. reaches two conclusions. They concern the lack of knowledge among modern youth and the impossibility of teaching reading and writing divorced from specific content. It is upon these two conclusions that I shall concentrate in this paper. Custom suggests that page 8 is a little early to arrive at conclusions of this type. The data supporting them only follow in a subsequent chapter (pp. 41-47). Yet this is the nature of Hirsch's book: journalistic, impressionistic, and totally convinced of the rectitude of the views advanced: namely, that reading and writing can be taught in schools by a common curriculum imparting the basic information constituting cultural literacy and embodying the norms and values of yesteryear when most people could read and write. These views clearly appealed to the Exxon Education Foundation, who funded Hirsch's research, and to Dr. William Bennett, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Secretary of Education to President Ronald Reagan, who has championed Hirsch's ideas in the corridors of power. Both responses, following an earlier Hirsch article in The American Scholar, "pulled me away from my ordinary scholarly concerns and into educational activism" (p. ix). Hirsch's book is not a "scholarly" work that painstakingly argues for conclusions that are evaluated in the light of conflicting evidence. Cultural Literacy is a work of "educational activism" in which the author advocates views aimed at advancing the interests of the elites holding political and economic power. For this purpose Hirsch uses the rhetoric of a conservative populism: conservative because he wishes to return to a common or "extensive curriculum" in order to revive the flagging "national vocabulary" (p. 139) and