October 9th, 2009
- ISBN13: 9780394758435
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product Description
In this forceful manifesto, Hirsch argues that children in the U.S. are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. Includes 5,000 essential facts to know.
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
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6 Comments
That’s right. This man is culturally illiterate. He knows next to nothing about his Vietnamese neighbors, what they eat, and what they believe. He knows nothing about holidays celebrated by the Hispanics who live across the street from him. He knows almost nothing about the African diaspora. He marginalizes his own neighbors in favor of a puerile list of factoids.
Worse, he knows nothing about where his food comes from, or the energy necessary to produce and transport it, and he doesn’t think your kids should care. Does he know where the clothes on his back were made? How about how the water got to the faucet, or how waste is treated? Are these cultural secrets? Or simply a further sign of his illiteracy?
Raising your child on E.D. Hirsch’s lists will turn your child into an E.D. Hirsch clone, or might qualify her for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But it has almost nothing to do with understanding our culture — the real culture of where we live, what we eat, or how we organize ourselves. This is a sad excuse for a book, and, in my judgment, simply a representation of Hirsch’s own inadequacies.
I hope someday he’ll grow up.
Rating: 1 / 5
be a crushing bore if you follow Mr. Hirsch’s path to cultural literacy. By his criteria we’re all pretty cultural illiterate & the next generation still in school even more so.
So what?
We can accomplish much of what he wants through better schools & a well rounded, rigorous education for all students. Adding courses on cultural literacy is not going to happen nor is it necessary given the pinch in $$$ & time these days in most school systems.
Being culturally literate is fine, but it gives you no pratical skills or training except perhaps to make you more charming. However, Mr. Hirsch doesn’t sound particularly charming.
The very arbitrariness of what constitutes cultural literacy according to Mr. Hirsch & his experts is flawed & quite off putting. He does not seem to acknowledge that cultural literacy constantly changes which makes a book like this obsolete before itis published. Subjects could be added & subtracted weekly. It should not merely be a list of historic factoids. When he decided to recite cultural words from a to z, I tuned out. For several cassettes & hours he droned on. I quit this audio version before he got to b.
Rating: 3 / 5
Hirsch is a European American who’s book Cultural Literacy,is a comprehensive discussion about what European American Cultural Literacy should consist of. Americans in general should be aware of this work and how the elements that Hirsch presents relate to their Cultural Health.
As an African America, I conclude that Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy is a good Eurocentic work, but it is too narrow to be considered “American” Cultural Literacy. As Americans we should have much in commont, as is pointed out. But we must also have some degree of Cultural Literacy regarding the other ethnic groups we live, work, and play with; if America is to move from “racial’ tolorance to ethnic harmony. Our Effectiveness as a nation, in the new Globle Village, depends on the broadest possable interethnic literacy which, should be America’s great advantage.
Rating: 4 / 5
I could write an equally long manifesto to combat Dr. Hirsch’s book, but this is neither the place nor the time.
Briefly, while not disputing Dr. Hirsch’s claim that this nation’s education system is inadequate, I would say that the majority of Dr. Hirsch’s (and America’s) communication problem seems to be rooted in a generation gap (and poor grammar).
Still barely being one of them, I can assure you that this nation’s youth, no matter what part of the country they might be from, have no difficulty to communicate with each other. However, during the technological revolution (80’s, 90’s, etc.) that Dr. Hirsch apparently missed, the basic vocabulary of youth has totally changed.
I’m sorry that most of today’s youth cannot recognize quotes from Shakespeare, but probably Dr. Hirsch’s generation could not recognize most of the equally valid references that America’s youth use in daily conversation either. These references are not absent, it is just that concepts like Zeitgeist, nom de plume, Icarus, etc. play a much less important role in modern life than they did in previous generations.
I would like to challenge Dr. Hirsch to discuss the East and Westcoast rivalry between hiphop artists (without going to research it first). Many of America’s youth could extemporaneously discuss that (if need be) and would certainly recognize references made to it.
Even if that example might be lacking, maybe we could put Dr. Hirsch in an internet chat room filled with teenagers from across the country.
Rating: 3 / 5
We all complained that our educational system is lacking, that our children do not have the knowledge they should have, but rarely do we ask “why”? E.D Hirsch, Jr., answer to this question is the lack of “cultural literacy”. Don’t let the term mislead you, “cultural literacy” here does not refer to the understanding of how a certain group prepare their food or how they dress. According to E.D. Hirsch, Jr., to be culturally literate is to “possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world”. Premises seen repeatedly throughout this book are:
1)Cultural literacy enable us to effectively communicate with others
2)Lack of cultural literacy is to blame for our children poor performances
3)[Therefore], we need a national curriculum of definite, share information for our children
Although Hirsch provided extensive research material to support his premises, his arguments were unfair and several logical fallacies were committed.
It’s true that cultural literacy is an essential part in communication, this point is proven in Hirsh many examples and can also be seen in our society everyday. He gave an example of his father alluding to Shakespearean phrase “there is a tide”. If everyone is culturally literate, no further explanation would be needed, for we all understand what it means. But if the person is culturally illiterate, we have to explain to them that it means “act now”. This lengthens the communication process and creates barriers. In everyday life, if you tell your friend that “Hong Kong is such a beautiful place”, and your friend look at you with puzzlement in his eyes and reply “but isn’t that an ape?”, situations like this would create a lot of misunderstanding in communications.
Hirsch second premise is unsound base on his reasoning and the experiments he presented. According to Hirsch, our children’s poor performance in school is due to their lack of cultural literacy, “the decline of literacy and the decline of shared knowledge are closely related,” Here, Hirsch committed the causal fallacy, is lack of cultural literacy really the cause of children’s performance, or could there be other factors? Hirsch never attempt to find out, he only presented facts that support his own argument by presenting statistic of children’s declining performance from the NAEP. Hirsch then demonstrate the children’s lack of knowledge by using his son’s class as an example. When asked if anyone knew the name of a poem written by Homer, one of the students replied “The Alamo”, when the answer is clearly “the Iliad”. This example supported Hirsch’s claim, but the sample size is too small and does not speak for the whole population. Hirsch committed the fallacy of overgeneralization. Just because one child may not know the answer to one question, does not mean other children do not either.
Even though the first premise is true, the falsity of the second premise leads to a false conclusion. Hirsch wants our school system to create a national curriculum from the lists of material he and two other professors composed (listed at the end of the book). The list includes things we see and hear everyday such as: Hercules, eureka, Achilles’ heel, seven deadly sins, and phrases like, “if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed…”, “don’t judge the book by its cover”…To me, this is by far the most fallacious argument. First of all, the list is compose by only three professors, Hirsch (an English teacher), Kett (historian) and Trefil (scientist). This is the worst case of appealing to un-qualify authority, they’re only knowledgeable in 3 fields of study, yet here they are composing a list of materials from every field known to man, from economic to geography, mathematics to political science. How did they come up with materials in fields unfamiliar to them, made them up? Or look them up in the Encyclopedia? We could do that on our own. Hirsch even admit, “We had to rely on our own experience and judgment to deciding what is central and what is subordinate in compiling such a list”.
Overall this book is a waste of my time, Hirsch could summarize his ideas and research into a two-pages essay. This 151 pages book contain nothing more than a simple idea “cultural literacy is everything”, an idea which he repeated countless of times in the book. Our children do not need to know who Marilyn Monroe or Cyclops is, and what cost-of-living means (listed in Hirsch dictionary), to thrive and succeed in today’s world. These are things we learn as we grow through life. Hirsch list probably would help us understand a joke, or a remark, but not necessarily essential in the education process.
Rating: 2 / 5
Dan Willingham, the brilliant University of Virginia cognitive psychologist, recently described Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy as the most misunderstood education book of the last fifty years. The comments here are a good illustration of this fundamental misunderstanding.
Despite the title, the soul of Hirsch’s argument is not cultural but technical. Shared content knowledge is not important as a means of imposing a particular viewpoint, culture or set of values. Rather it’s important because it’s what makes communication – reading, writing, speaking and listening – possible at all. As Willingham put it: “Research findings consistently show that students who are identified as ‘poor readers’ suddenly look quite good when they read passages on familiar subjects….Still, this fact has not seeped into public consciousness nor sufficiently penetrated teacher training programs. Most teachers and administrators think of reading as readily transferable. Once kids know how to read, they can read anything.
Language competency is the direct result of our ability to make correct inferences –to fill in the gaps left by writers and speakers. Comprehension happens because it is assumed that readers and listeners share background knowledge. It is this lack of background knowledge that causes understanding to break down.
To take issue with Hirsch’s work as somehow wishing to impose a Eurocentric culture on non those whose background is not European spectacularly misses the point.
A couple of links discuss these points more fully:
How Knowledge Helps
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring06/willingham.htm
The Reading Wars: Round 2
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/01/the-reading-wars-round-2-content-knowledge-vs-reading-strategies/
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